Afghanistan heads off cliff

The classified report finds that the breakdown in central authority in Afghanistan has been accelerated by rampant corruption within the government of President Hamid Karzai and by an increase in violence by militants who have launched increasingly sophisticated attacks from havens in Pakistan.

The report, a nearly completed version of a National Intelligence Estimate, is set to be finished after the November elections and will be the most comprehensive American assessment in years on the situation in Afghanistan. Its conclusions represent a harsh verdict on decision-making in the Bush administration, which in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks made Afghanistan the central focus of a global campaign against terrorism.

Beyond the cross-border attacks launched by militants in neighboring Pakistan, the intelligence report asserts that many of Afghanistan's most vexing problems are of the country's own making, the officials said.

The report cites gains in the building of Afghanistan's national army, the officials said. But they said it also laid out in stark terms what it described as the destabilizing impact of the booming heroin trade, which by some estimates accounts for 50 percent of Afghanistan's economy.

But I think there are four key problems that remain in Afghanistan, which as many people have noted have gotten worse in the last couple of years. The first, I think, is Pakistan which Bruce is going to talk about. Certainly the number one lesson of counterinsurgency is that you really can't defeat it as long as it has sanctuary. And Pakistan represents sanctuary for the Afghan insurgency and is a big reason for the
military stalemate. The second problem is a weak Afghan government performance and corruption. The third problem is a growing drug trade and narco-economy. And the fourth problem is lack of civilian capacity from the international community, both including poor coordination of international aid.

I mention those problems because it's, when you think about it really combat troops don't address of them, certainly directly.The ideas behind increased troops for Afghanistan don't really seem to have a strategic rationale. Ken mentioned that the surge was a lot more than just increased troops. I don't quite see that in the troop proposals for Afghanistan. They seem to have more of a tactical rationale to improve
local security.

Certainly troops and no one is suggesting that the troops could seal the 2600 kilometer mountainous border with Pakistan and they certainly couldn't improve governance. We know in part that increased troop presence in Afghanistan can't solve the problems I
mentioned because there actually has been a surge in troops in Afghanistan as the situation has deteriorated over the last two years. The NATO ISAF mission has gone from 31,000 troops in October 2006 to 41,000 in October 2007 to 53,000 now. And U.S. troops have increased within that by about 12,000.

And certainly these increased troop presence can and have made a difference in local areas as the Marines have done recently in Helmand, but I guess you sort of have to ask yourself on a strategic level to what end? If the problems above are unaddressed what are we going to achieve by these temporary local gains in security. They're
essentially spitting in the wind.

We already have enough troops in place to achieve such local gains. What we don't have is the ability to follow up those local gains with improvements in governance and security, particularly in the south. And this has to be said against the negatives of an increased troop presence. First, is the notion that this is a foreign occupation. I think the Afghan population has been very tolerant and supportive of the international presence in Afghanistan so far, but that has a limit and certainly increased troops play into the Taliban propaganda that the international effort there is an attempt to undermine Islam and the Afghan state.

Increased civilian casualties by pro-government forces which have increased as the number of troops in Afghanistan have increased despite very assiduous efforts to avoid them. It's interesting, one of the things our Afghan Index demonstrates is that civilian casualties are going down, civilian casualties caused by pro-government forces, by Afghan forces, international forces are going down as a percentage of overall civilian casualties but they're going up absolutely.

What that implies to me is that the measures to decrease civilian causalities in any particular incident are working, but the increased troop presence is causing more incidents and of course the increased Taliban activity is causing more incidents. And so, civilian casualties are going up all together.