Does America Send More Troops To Afghanistan Or What? (Part One)

[JimofPennsylvan]

The question that the American people, and in particular President Obama, has coming toward them like a zooming freight train is what to do about Afghanistan? Does America send huge numbers of additional troops or does America begin to draw down troops, etc.? The stakes involved there are enormous so America needs to analyze the problem clearly and get it right!

The first thing America needs to face on Afghanistan is to recognize that on its present course Afghanistan will fail as a democratic country; it can’t indefinitely sustain the current level of terrorist’s bombings and violence and lack of security. Also noteworthy is that there is nothing presently going on in Afghanistan that one can be highly confident will bring about the defeat of the insurgency or if one prefers the title the Taliban. There is nothing on the horizon in Afghanistan that will engender in the Afghanistan people the needed commitment to see the Taliban movement end, its recruitment faces no critical shortage – excluding ideological issues it provides a job to many Afghanistanis who otherwise wouldn’t have one, its income source drug trafficking sees no critical threat, etc.. This assessment necessitates the need to recognize that no amount of military troops from the U.S. or NATO will reverse this insurgency because no amount of military power can force ordinary Afghanistan citizens to be whole heartedly committed to seeing the Afghanistan government succeed and see the Taliban movement be put out of existence permanently which is what is needed to defeat the Taliban.

To get to the whole heart of this matter what the country of Afghanistan needs is a good government a government ordinary Afghanistanis will support, they believe represents them, gives them a voice, is one they trust, is effective, etc..
One cannot underscore or emphasize enough the importance of giving the Afghanistan people the choice of a good government as an alternative to the Taliban – this is an absolutely indispensable, must have element of a new strategy for Afghanistan for the country of Afghanistan to succeed. This shouldn’t be any big surprise to anyone an abundance of America’s military and non-military leaders and various types of analysts have been publicly saying this for awhile however they use a more diplomatic characterization by saying American and NATO countries need an Iraqi partner to bring about success in Iraq.

To get down to the details of the strategy American needs to take on Afghanistan one needs to look at the following. The country of Afghanistan chose as its system of government a centralized form of government. That was a huge glacial size mistake. Afghanistan doesn’t have the history of effectiveness in this area, they have a shortage of experts, the literacy rate amongst their people is very poor, corruption is rampant in their culture, etc.. The problems associated with creating a good and effective central government in Afghanistan were daunting to begin with and as history has borne out been insurmountable. Currently, in Afghanistan the President of the country picks the governor of each province, provincial legislatures have practically no power to do anything. Specifically, the course needed in Afghanistan for the country to succeed is that the whole form of government in Afghanistan has to be flipped, Afghanistan needs to scrap its central form of government and adopt a decentralized form of government. Individual Afghanistan citizens in a province need to be able to elect their governor and the members of the province’s legislature and the President of the country should have no power at all to remove any of these people from office. Provincial legislatures need to have a broad array of power, they need to be able to tax people and businesses and spend money on infrastructure –water, sewer, electricity, etc. Provinces need to have their own police force with the Provincial governor as its head – provinces need to be able to provide complete functioning governments to their people. Provinces need to have their own court system. In short, Afghanistan provinces need to be set-up from a governmental authority standpoint like America’s states are.

What would this decentralized form of government do for the Afghanistani people? For one, it would overcome somewhat the disenchantment with government based on ethnic division. If you’re a Tajik Afghanistani your naturally not going to care about a Pashtun central government because your not going to think they care about you. If the government is decentralized the government that matters for the individual Afghanistani will be his or her local government, the government made up of people from his or her own ethnic group from his or her own province; in a decentralized government the individual Afghanistani will have the motivation to support the provincial government. If provinces are empowered constitutionally to form a strong and effective government there will be much better odds they will succeed because not only will there be this local connection but it will be much easier for outside help to be able to build an effective government for a province because currently now outsiders have to try to build large effective central government organizations of government and with the corruption, lack of skilled personnel, ethnic and other challenges the task is too challenging building provincial government organization presents lesser and smaller scope challenges so there is more likely to be successes. In the new form of government for Afghanistan, the central government won’t be powerless they will have authority for national defense, protecting civil rights of ordinary citizens and numerous other powers but the new system will empower the provincial governments to establish fully effective governments so as to provide for their people so that it won’t be a big deal if the central government is dysfunctional.

“SEE PART TWO”