Afghanistan: The Great Lock ‘n Load Swindle
Afghanistan: Karzai’s Victory over the US

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Another Sunday, another set of articles and punditry setting out the US can “win” the conflict in Afghanistan. The latest spin is that of the US military supporting a series of local militias throughout the country to defeat the Taliban: this, I presume, is more a signal of Washington’s careful distancing from the perceived weakness of the Karzai Government to sell a troop escalation. The New York Times packages the spin as a report by Dexter Filkins, while David Ignatius openly backs the initiative in his opinion piece in The Washington Post, “Afghan Tribes to the Rescue?”

In a guest column for Juan Cole’s website, William Polk, a former member of the State Department and professor at the University of Chicago, puts forth an alternative: political and economic steps linked to a measured withdrawal of US troops:

In its war in Afghanistan, the United States has come to a crossroads. President Obama will be forced to choose one of four ways ahead. The choices are cruel, expensive and dangerous for our country; so we must be sure that he chooses the least painful, least expensive and safest of the possible choices.

The first possible choice is to keep on doing what we are now doing. That is, fighting the insurgency with about 60,000 American troops and 68,197 mercenaries at a cost of roughly $2,000 a day per person. That is, we now actually have a total complement of over 120,000 people on the public payroll at an overall cost, of roughly $100 billion a year. We can project a loss of a few hundred American soldiers a year and several thousand wounded. Our senior commander in the Central Command, General David Petraeus, tells us that we cannot win that war.
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