Around 2006, in the race between Chaos and Order,  Chaos began to win the day.   Since then, the situation in Afghanistan has taken a turn for the oh-so-much-worse. Suicide bombing has skyrocketed in the cities. Civilian authority has tattered in the countryside. Drug lords and warlords are growing ever stronger. Economically, a majority of the people are actually worse off now than they were in the days of the Taliban. The United Nations’ recently published annual list of worst places to live puts Afghniastan second from the bottom.  It’s the first time the country has made the bottom-ten list since 1996, which means it is worse off now than it was at the peak of Taliban rule, in 2000. 

I’m always amazed that people who argue for more and more troops represent their view as hard-headed realism. In 2003, the United States had about 13,000 troops in the country, all concentrated along the border with Pakistan, their mission quite dogmatically defined as being to hunt down terrorists and kill them.  At that time, the violence in Afghansitan was mostly concentrated along the border. The rest of the country looked poised for a normalization of life and for economic recovery.  

In the years that followed, the troop level rose to 18,000, then 25,000, and then 40,000. Now it stand as 68,000. Meanwhile,  people working in Afghanistan for private WEstern military countractors, in tandem with U.S. forces, has grown to about 70,000, bringing the total to nearly 140,000. Add another 30,000 or so NATO troops from other countries and you find that foreign troops in Afghanistan now exceed the number the Soviet Union had there at its peak, and they are operating in much the same way as the Soviets did, from garrisons surrounded by rural insurgents and from cities that are increasingly like garrisons.

How is this strategy working? Well–beheadings are up; suicide bombings are up; insurgent activity, which had spread to nearly three-quarters of the country’s province by 2007, now infects 90% of Afghan territory.  All the foreign troop increases in Afghanistan have resulted in more and more people joining regressive movements (usually referred to by the umbrella term “Taliban”) that vow to take Afghanistan back to the social norms of a thousand years ago, movements that have a glamor to them in Afghanistan because they purport to fight foreign occupation.

It’s time for U.S. policymakers (and the U.S. public) to stop asking: “How many troops” and start asking “What should the troops be doing in Afghanistan?”

Here are some of my recent commentaries on Afghanistan. 

Social Fabric:  President Obama is huddling with his advisors to discuss whether more troops will win the war in Afghanistan, but looking at Afghanistan as a war to be won may be an error. Rather, this is a socially and psychologically damaged society and the question is really: How to restore social fabric of this wounded society. An op-ed at CNN.com.

Eight Years Later:  In 2001, the US launched a war to oust the Taliban from Afghanistan and eliminate al Qaeda bases there. What has been achieved and what military strategy should be adopted now? Al Jazeera’s Riz Khan discusses the issue with retired Brigadier General Mark Kimmit and me. Go to Youtube1 and Youtube 2.

Quagmire? Is America wading into a Vietnam-like quagmire in Afghanistan? If so, should the Obama administration pull all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan? If not, what should the administration do instead?  An op-ed at SF Gate.

Afghan Star. A new movie documents the competition in Kabul among Afghan musicians to win a coveted prize on the television show Afghan Star,  modeled after Britian’s Pop Idol and America’s  American Idol. What does Afghan Star tell us about Afghan society today? A conversation with Jeremy Hatch at the Rumpus Room.

History Lesson: A thousand years of Afghan history in 30 minutes—this is video of a speech I gave in the spring of 2009 at the Veteran’s for Peace conference in Seattle. A video at peppersprayproductions

• Afghan Friends Network, 68 Ramona Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94103 . (A group of Afghans and Americans working together on small-scale projects. Currently, they are training teachers and purchasing science supplies for schools in Afghanistan’s Ghazni province.)
• IFDC P.O. Box 2040, Muscle Shoals, Alabama 35662 This 30-year-old non-profit works in the world’s poorest countries to promote sustainable agricultural productivity through environmentally sound technology. It’s a terrific outfit with many success stories to its credit, and it’s intensively active in Afghanistan.
• Help the Afghan Children, 8603 Westwood Center Drive, Suite 230, Vienna, Virginia 22182. (Founded and operated by Afghans, active for many years, has proven itself with deeds. Check them out at www.HelpTheAfghanChildren.org)

http://www.afghanistannews.net
Up to the minute headline news about Afghanistan.

http://www.afgha.com/ Lnks to pictures of personalities, maps, new stories, Afghan community forums, and other interesting stuff.

http://www.afghana.com/Education/News.htm Streaming audio, news in Dari and Pushto as well as English, cartoons, magazine articles about Afghanistan published in other countries, links to sites such as AlterNet and more.

http://www.afghanmagazine.com
Website of Lemaar-Aftaab, a now-defunct online magazine published by Afghan-Americans in Fremont, California (but previous issues are archived here).