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I think the contradiction here is this: you agree it’s important to prevent Al Qaeda (and, I assume, by extension the Taliban) from gaining control of those outlying areas, but you don’t want to see time and energy wasted on Karzai’s government making futile attempts to control them, either. So how do we prevent the Taliban from controlling them, if not by making use of the central government? Quilts alone won’t do it — Jacob made some good points about that below, and besides, sewing a handmade quilt is an enormous job. Getting hundreds of thousands of them made by winter would require forced labor on a scale not seen since slavery.

Look, we’ve got a lot of different threads going here now — the recent deaths of those civilians, the release of the photos, Afghanistan’s ethnic diversity… There’s so easy solution to all this. And there isn’t really any straightforward, easy criticism either.

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I think the problem is that, we tried the “leave the government in Kabul” tactic. What happened? The Taliban/Al Qaeda hung out in those ethnic minority parts until the troop numbers went down.

I guess I’m a little clueless about this ethnic diversity, but if a people are so impoverished that they cannot make their own quilts to stay warm in the winter time, are we then affecting change by sending some to them? Should we not consider the socio-economic factors that are leading to such poverty? When we’re done feeling better about ourselves, and the quilts rot (literally and figuratively speaking), what will these people have–more foreign aid? Doesn’t it make sense to unite them–even loosely–under a single, stable, democratically-elected structure? If not, aren’t we just jerking ourselves off by being over there at all.

From everything thing I’ve heard from friends deployed to Iraq/Afghanistan, we’re not in the business of villager killing. It’s amazing how much an combatant looks like a “villager” to an outsider (say, a BBC reporter) when he hides his AK-47. Thankfully, the locals have a tendency to know who isn’t a “local”, and I think American policy (in Iraq, at least) has been working to that end. The Al-Anbar awakening showed us that, if we work with the local people (particularly local leaders), they’ll quickly identify the six Lebanese/Iranian/Syrian/Pakistani men who moved in right around the time the IEDs started getting planted. (I’ll quickly note: NYT didn’t have the balls to embed someone in the Anbar province in the time leading up the awakening. You know who was there? Christian Science Monitor and Army Times. Everyone else was off thumping their chest in Baghdad’s green zone, hearing about the war as second hand as almost everyone else).

At the end of the day, someone is giving up time–probably quilt-making time, if our proposed aid efforts are to be given merit–to crawl up mountains outside of American FOBs and firing old soviet rockets at our soldiers. These are not f*#king goat herders. Maybe they were, but they’re not any more. Even semi-successful farmers don’t have that kind of free time. If anything, these are probably the same guys threatening to kill the goat herder’s family if they say anything to the coalition forces. And I think our “policy” is to do our best to mitigate THAT guy. Because frankly, if we leave and THAT guy is still around (or not given a democratic outlet for his/her grievances), the quilts will just get stolen anyway–and the quilt owner will probably be raped.

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What’s NOT important is helping Hamid Karzai’s government extend control over ethnic minority parts of Afghanistan that no Kabul government has ever managed to govern. Doing so is impossible, and just breeds resentment that strengthens the true extremists.

Read Rory Stewart’s The Places In Between to get a sense of just how diverse Afghanistan is – there are several nations in one, vast territory.

Winning hearts and minds is so much more important than killing villagers. I’d like to see a shipment of hundreds of thousands of handmade American quilts go directly to villagers in the Afghan mountains before the next winter.

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Also interesting to note that while the Beltway crowd plays politics, over 100 civilian Afghan villagers, including dozens of children, were blown to bits in a U.S. missile attack.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/world/asia/15farah.html?ref=global-home

U.S. policy in Afghanistan is so wrong-headed it makes me sick.

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http://gawker.com/5253864/if-youre-angry-about-the-torture-photos-youre-being-played-by-obama?skyline=true&s=x

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I wanted this post to be inflammatory because I want this never-ending war to end and the only way for that to happen is for enough Americans to get angry and informed enough to give a damn.

Re: the Taliban. It’s so, so important to recognize that Afghanistan is a complicated mish-mash of ethnic groups, with different languages, customs and political hierarchies. NO government – not even the Taliban – has EVER controlled all of Afghanistan.

The NY Times article I linked to described the ambush and slaughter of about a dozen people in the Korangal valley. The Korangalis are not Pashtun and while they might take money from “the Taliban” the unique social, linguistic and political structure of the area makes it impossible to lump them in with “Afghans” or “The Taliban” or “terrorists”.

They are wood-cutters who lost their source of income when Karzai’s government banned logging, and they’re justifiably pissed off about the occupying force that’s telling them how to live.

The important subtleties of ethnic affiliation and political history are impossible to ascertain when the U.S. media is complicit and lazy. They’re even harder to figure out from a freaking bunker in Nevada.

How would we respond if Chinese Predator Drones piloted from Shanghai were mowing down Tibetan Resistance fighters?

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