Rory Stewart wonders why he could never persuade anyone that our mission in Afghanistan was hopeless:
I knew the international community underestimated the reality of Afghan rural life: they did not grasp just how poor, fragile, and traumatized Afghanistan was; just how conservative and resistant to foreigners, villages could be. Our institutions were too inherently optimistic, too ad hoc, too isolated from the concerns and realities of Afghan life, too caught up in metaphysical abstractions of “governance” and “the rule of law” ever to succeed—or to notice that we were not succeeding. But I don’t think I ever convinced a single international in Kabul that “counterinsurgency” or “state-building” was doomed to failure.
David Rohde takes issue with Stewart's view, while Anne-Marie Slaughter shares her own shift from optimism to a position closer to Stewart's. Tim Lynch is more succinct: "We have based our campaign on a lie and that lie is that we have a viable, legitimate, capable host nation government." Ackerman's reporting backs up Lynch:
[M]ost of Afghanistan’s men in uniform can’t read at a kindergarten level, much less understand the instrument panels on a helicopter or the serial numbers on their rifles. That’s one reason why it’ll be years before the U.S. takes its training wheels off the Afghan soldiers’ bikes. Although the Obama administration plans to turn the war over to forces [Lt. Gen. William Caldwell] trains by 2014, Caldwell told Danger Room in June that the Afghans will need U.S. training until as late as 2017.
Matthieu Aikins reports on horrific abuses by an ally of the host government. Joshua Foust uses the piece to complicate the "good versus evil" narrative in the fight against the Taliban.
The Dish 