A Real December Review for Afghanistan

[unhappycamper]

A Real December Review for Afghanistan
by Greg Kaufmann
Published on Monday, January 3, 2011 by The Nation

The War in Afghanistan is the longest in US history, at 110 months, and the most expensive, at $1 million per soldier and over $100 billion annually. There have been over 2,200 US and coalition casualties, and tens of thousands of Afghan civilian deaths. Additionally, nearly 600 US troops are wounded every month.

Given these extraordinary human and economic costs—at a time when there is great economic pain at home and 60 percent of Americans think the war is not worth fighting—there was much anticipation of the "December Review" President Obama promised one year ago when he announced a 30,000-troop increase in Afghanistan.

But last month the administration began to downplay the review's significance, saying it would only look at the strategy's progress rather than consider policy alternatives. And there was no shortage of leaks revealing that the report would show progress is being made.

So when an unclassified version of the review was finally released, it came as little surprise that it concluded that "the strategy is showing progress."

~snip~

If we cared about socioeconomic-political development in Afghanistan—if we truly cared about it—we would have a 180-degree switch. We wouldn't be using "Beltway bandits," we'd be using local mechanisms, and we wouldn't need to have "USA" stamped on everything. Local development organizations in Afghanistan, who receive US funds, operate this way. They demand that the US is not associated with the project in any way. The organizations know this the only way the project will be successful and free from insurgent attack.