As James pointed out, a 'national government' in Afghanistan usually means about the same level of 'government' as the UN has as a world government, except that the 'national government' of Afghanistan usually controls Kabul. So the interests of whichever faction controls Kabul doesn't matter as much for the rest of Afghanistan.

Which means that the obvious US option by early 2002 was to treat it as a punitive expedition, and to refrain from backing any faction there except as it helped our punitive expedition.

Instead, the Bush administration chose to strive for the worst of all worlds, by pretending that we were liberating Afghanistan, leaving in ~30-40K troops + ~40K NATO troops, but diverting most forces (including Green Berets) to Iraq. This meant that we couldn't do jack sh*t in Afghanistan except to take casualties.

The key problem is that the Kabul government isn't particularly interested in doing the things that would make it into a national government while the Taliban is.

Posted by Dave Schuler | December 28, 2008

Anybody here old enough to remember Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980's complaining that their puppet government, in Kabul, was insufficiently interested in unifying the country?

"They've [the US have] already repeated all of our mistakes." -Zamir Kaboluv

Frankly we were all (including me) made irrational by 9'11 and we didn't realize that, Duh, an outside superpower trying to occupy and then unify Afghanistan is dumb as hell. Even the homegrowns, the fanatical Taliban, couldn't do it. The years they supposedly 'ruled' the country were really an ongoing civil war between them and other alliances.

Posted by Dave Schuler | December 28, 2008

So we are supposed to stay and fight there in that God awful place while these two factions decide what they are going to do....sounds like a good plan to me....NOT!!!!!

Cheap, expensive, whatever. There were never any great options on Afghanistan.

Agreed Dave, as I argued back in 2001 (and caught no end of hell for) and have reiterated here since (I was never in favor of the invasion of Afghanistan. Divide and conquer was my motto). But if you are gonna go, go whole hog. If we had, maybe at least we would have had Bin Laden at Tora Bora. As is...

Well, there is the old saying: "You can rent an Afghan, but you can't buy one."

Our alternatives in Afghanistan are few: either we can commit to an essentially permanent engagement there that's at the very least partially military or we can bomb the living daylights out of it every so often to eliminate the terrorists who'll have re-established their bases or we isolate it even further than it is already.

So, basically, we're screwed? I guess this is what happens when you do war on the cheap.

Our alternatives in Afghanistan are few: either we can commit to an essentially permanent engagement there that's at the very least partially military or we can bomb the living daylights out of it every so often to eliminate the terrorists who'll have re-established their bases or we isolate it even further than it is already.

Can anyone answer why we didn't embark on a Marshall Plan-style rebuilding effort of Afghanistan in 2003-04?

There wasn't a terrorist insurgency trying to undermine the rebuilding of Western Europe in 1946. Further, "re-build" was an accurate description of the task then, whereas in Afghanistan the task was to leapfrog ahead several centuries, modernizing a country that had never been modern.

We've had some demonstrations here that self-determination can't be given. Oh, you can give people a chance. You can clear out the Nazis or the Emperor or the Supreme Leader, but after that a nation has to want it, as their own goal. Self-determination can't be a right without being a responsibility. That's basic enough that we teach it in grade school civics classes.

I think the thing to ask is why the Taliban is coming back ... and if it is the culture's choice, how long we want to fight it.

We might want to back off (stand off), and treat them as enemies if they want to be.