Tuesday, June 22, 2010

"Throwing money at the problem (Afghanistan) exacerbates the problem"

Funny. This sounds exactly like what I was getting at in the previous post below.

This is the final paragraph of the profile on General Stanley McChrystal in the upcoming issue of Rolling Stone Magazine. He's seen to be a brilliant, driven, canny, crafty tactician with extraordinary experience and skill, all being squandered on a mistake. Brilliance in the service of a misguided mission seems to me a tragic blunder.

Rolling Stone.com:

After nine years of war, the Taliban simply remains too strongly entrenched for the U.S. military to openly attack. The very people that COIN seeks to win over – the Afghan people – do not want us there. Our supposed ally, President Karzai, used his influence to delay the offensive, and the massive influx of aid championed by McChrystal is likely only to make things worse. "Throwing money at the problem exacerbates the problem," says Andrew Wilder, an expert at Tufts University who has studied the effect of aid in southern Afghanistan. "A tsunami of cash fuels corruption, delegitimizes the government and creates an environment where we're picking winners and losers" – a process that fuels resentment and hostility among the civilian population. So far, counterinsurgency has succeeded only in creating a never-ending demand for the primary product supplied by the military: perpetual war. There is a reason that President Obama studiously avoids using the word "victory" when he talks about Afghanistan. Winning, it would seem, is not really possible. Not even with Stanley McChrystal in charge.

This article appears in in RS 1108/1109 from July 8-22, 2010, on newsstands Friday, June 25.

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