NYT Editorial: "Losing the good war"

After several years of quiet neglect Afghanistan is receiving some attention. There's nothing new, per se, in the Times editorial, but it crisply encapsulates some flaws in our strategy: insufficient attention to providing justice, inadequate oversight of mission-critical contracts, and too much focus on quantity of security forces rather than their quality (manifest through crash courses rather than sustained field training.)

The Times editorial is better than most, but it still opts for easy cynicism in concluding "so much for winning the good war." Perhaps we should not read too much into this rhetorical flourish, but is the Times implying that the war cannot be won? What would "winning" entail? 

Reconstruction of fractured nations is a daunting task, and we'd be having problems even if things had been managed well. Yet much has been achieved in Afghanistan, people remain optimistic (twice as many Afghans see the country headed in the right direction as in the wrong direction), and disaster is far from inevitable. Drawing too close a parallel to the brutal unraveling of Iraq--as it seems fashionable to do--is analytically lazy and has real consequences for a project of such importance.

Losing the Good War, NY Times Op-ed, Dec 5
...The failure to provide local security — or even a semblance of impartial justice — helps explain why so many Afghans have lost confidence in the pro-Western government of President Hamid Karzai, and why a growing number are again turning to the Taliban for protection. MORE

The failure to stand up an effective police force also helps explain why opium cultivation rose by nearly 60 percent this year.

Creating even the most basic government institutions was always going to be difficult in a country as poor as Afghanistan. According to one expert, 70 percent or more of the recruits in the police training program are illiterate — not surprising in a country with a male literacy rate of only 43 percent. But the State Department and Pentagon compounded these problems, handing off the bulk of the police training work to an expensive private contractor and then failing to vigilantly monitor the program. We have seen that time and again in Iraq, where experts say the police training is at least as flawed...

As for fixing the police training program, there is little hope of that without also reforming the Afghan Ministry of Interior, which oversees the police, and is mired in both incompetence and corruption. Washington has sent some advisers to help clean up the ministry, but the effort is moving far too slowly. And the United States and its allies need to send a lot more police advisers to walk the beat with the newly graduated recruits, who get just a few months of classroom training. That is standard practice for training effective police forces, but it has not been tried in Afghanistan.

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