How To Win In Afghanistan Part 3

FUTURE PLANS
Therefore, in my opinion, a better way to go about doing things in Afghanistan is to immediately mend relations with all of the informal institutions and power structures of the country. We need to tolerate and respect these elements and adopt a policy of non-interference as it relates to the political and social structures in Afghanistan. In other words, we need to let the Taliban be, so long as they are not supporting Al Qaeda, even if their practices offend our western sensibilities (sensibilities, I might add, that took us over 200 years to arrive at.)
We also need to stop wasting our time targeting Afghan drug-lords. If we really believe that drug sales are helping to finance terror, then we need to strike at the crux of the problem (the market) and not waste our time, lives and resources groping after the tail (the supply of drugs.) Simply put, we need to take the profit motive out of drugs through legalization. This would be the longest-lasting, most efficient, and by far the most insidious strategy we could employ against the drug-lords.
But the courage to use a strategy like this one only comes from an ability to see beyond ones’ nose (present troubles) and by not getting bogged down in costly short-term fixes that prove to be disastrous in the end. Otherwise you could go with the failed drug strategy of interdiction and, having done so, do something ludicrous like employ our DEA in Afghanistan; the same DEA which has failed to win the war on drugs in America, having been boxed into the asphyxiant strategy of interdiction (legislatively.)
Essentially, we (the United States) must undo all the nation-building efforts that have been undertaken thus far in Afghanistan. We must tear down all of the ethnocentrically driven social experiments we have concocted there; experiments such as western style governance (democracy) along with our social norms and customs. And it won’t take long either. Thanks to the nature of the universe (the fact that all things tend toward entropy), deconstructing a thing is always much faster and easier than putting it together.
Now if the idea of democracy is ever seen expressed again on the landmass which is Afghanistan, may it be in accordance with the will of the Afghan people themselves (and not foreign interlopers such as ourselves.) More importantly, by undoing this Western façade (through acknowledging, making peace with and cooperating alongside of the ‘real powerbrokers’ in Afghanistan) we maintain a higher level of real activity (momentum producing non-wasted effort), relative to and in comparison with our enemies. Also by not being bogged down, having rejected the foolishness of ‘nation-building’ (which inefficiently turns soldiers into things like placatory appeasers) we avoid the costly and unproductive busy work of ‘the vicious cabaret’ played out before our eyes in Afghanistan these last 8 years.
Beyond this, we save face before the World and remain fleet of foot as a nation able to change course quickly in order to respond to new or resurgent threats in a timely manner. Doing otherwise is like being in a fight and throwing a punch (powerful but slow) that is left out too long allowing a swifter and more agile opponent to slip passed it delivering a knockout blow- in the form of a hook to a vulnerable and undefended flank. If the arm (leadership), with its hand (armed forces) cannot retract (withdraw forces) itself quickly enough, the blow will land and the fight could be lost.
Our nation is not a Christian nation, despite some of the founders being Christian themselves, and had they (the founders) wanted it to be Christian they could have easily said so- and dispensed with that whole First Amendment thing. Therefore, it is not our job (as a nation) to ‘go into all the World and preach the Gospel’- freeing the oppressed as we go. We are not ‘the Savior of the World’ either. And need to stop acting like it as well. Besides, we have way too much nation-building going on (and that needs to go on further still) in our own country- than to be wasting our resources building up another nation; that has grown to hate and despise us for all our interloping. (Insurgencies cannot exist without aid from the local populace.)
We went to Afghanistan to capture or kill terrorists. Beyond that, all we wanted to was to deny them save haven (in Afghanistan). And that’s it! So we need to get back to the task at hand and our real mission in the World (because these experiments have not at all been beneficial to us.) And This we must do, in order to exit that nation.
We have to undo ‘the Gordian knot’ we have created for ourselves and end this doomed experiment with democracy. I call it doomed, by the way, because democracy is something that only works if it comes out of the heart of a people- it can’t be forced; not through sham elections, alien political institutions, corrupt politicians and us saying, ‘democracy is the way’. Democracy only works when it originates from the heart of a people, though it can be helped along somewhat (once beyond its infancy.)
In order to mend relations with these elements, one of the first things we must do is return the natural sovereignty of each region and province of Afghanistan. We must have the corrupt Afghan government formally cede back all lands and territories it has claimed to the local parties that originally had control over them. And we have the right to request this- being that the Afghan government exists only through the blood of our dead. For without us it would soon collapse under the weight of its own decay.
The corrupt Afghan government should be a shell left intact to serve only as a ‘figure-head’ that wields no real power. President Karzai and his government would simply be the rulers of the region surrounding the capital, as one of several provincial satrapies (and nothing else.) All the rest of the territories of the country would be ceded back to the current (or original) powerbrokers that have control over them at present. Should the leadership of Afghanistan choose to build a real nation out of the shell government that exist there now, we (the United States) should not interfere (for good or for evil.)