Gates And Mullen Talk Afghanistan

The equally experienced and realistic SecDef Robert Gates along with the ever-so-diplomatic Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen, held a Washington ceremony today. They held a joint press conference. There were no surprises.

Both men belabored the self-evident with the pro forma vigor of beating a dead horse. You betcha, things are far from good in Afghan Land. You betcha, the US won't lose (we think.) You betcha, there may be a need for more boots on the ground even though all the boots (and loafers for the civilian "surge") authorized by the President have not arrived yet.

And, the deadest horse of all: We have only started an effective effort in the past few weeks. Right you are, Chief. No one bothered to call the blunders of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld years an "economy of force" approach. That, at least, was refreshing.

Far less refreshing was the unwillingness or inability of the two men to acknowledge a reality every bit as evident and even more compelling than those which they dilated upon. That troublesome reality is the nature of the Karzai regime, or, for that matter, any central government, even one which is everything the Karzai bunch is not.

As has been demonstrated in previous posts, the place for troops and aid alike is out in the boonies. Out with the tribals and the villagers. Out among the real Afghans who know what is needed for them to feel and believe two important things: That the Americans are not pursuing an imperial interest alone but are willing and able to insulate the locals from the destruction and death of war; and the Americans will follow the local's guidance regarding the requirements for a viable, dynamically stable, self-organizing community.

Karzai, his government and the civilian advisors to that corrupt Kabul based Frankenstein are not directly relevant to the announced goal of obliterating al-Qaeda and by implication Taliban as well as convincing future Afghan governments not to make the mistake of offering harbor to Islamist jihadists. In Afghanistan history, demography and culture alike combine to insist that any genuine, legitimate government in Kabul be the result of the interactions among local, self-organizing communities.

Anything else will be brushed with the tar of foreign imposition. This reality has doomed past Afghan central governments, most recently in the years following 1979.

If either Mr Gates or Admiral Mullen had made that observation and commitment to the dictates of realpolitik, it would have transformed their little ceremony into something really important. A real news event with the headline: Administration Officials Get A Grip.