Is Afghanistan Lost (Too)?

"After a month traveling around Afghanistan this autumn, I was forced to a grim conclusion," author and Nation commentator Christian Parenti wrote recently. "This project is lost, and nothing very good will likely replace it." The reasons Parenti gives for his pessimism are numerous:

First, there are the immediate blunders of the occupiers who, despite extensive European involvement, are led by the Americans. Next are deeper historical dynamics dating back to the U.S. role in the anti-Soviet jihad. And finally there are much older cultural, political and economic facts about Afghanistan that have long made this a wild, lawless place, impervious to conquest and even resistant to the modernizing efforts of its urban middle classes.

While the "wild, lawless" language sounds to me like exoticizing a war-weary country on the receiving end of decades of U.S. aggression and/or indifference (Parenti also writes, "Perhaps history doomed this project from the start"), the conditions prompting the prose are indeed dire:

Half of Afghanistan is under effective insurgent control; scores of international troops have been killed this year. Between January and Oct. 8 of this year, there were 78 suicide bombings, killing nearly 200 people. Last year saw only 17 suicide attacks. In the last six months, several previously stable provinces have slipped into chaos. A few dissident British soldiers have accused NATO and U.S. forces of bombing and strafing villages. Despite, or more likely because of this firepower, the situation in key southern provinces like Helmand and Kandahar has deteriorated badly. The British were recently forced to negotiate a withdrawal from one of their southern bases in Masa Qala, essentially surrendering the area to the Taliban.

By late summer, the military crisis in southern Afghanistan was so bad that NATO's top U.S. commander, Gen. James Jones, was begging for 2,500 extra troops to join the fight in Afghanistan's deep south. Few extra soldiers were forthcoming. France was asked to move the 2,000 NATO troops under its command in Kabul south but refused, claiming they were needed in the capital.

The resurgent Taliban now control districts just outside Kabul, in Lowgar and Wardak provinces, and are even launching attacks on NATO troops in and around Kabul. In September, Mullah Dadullah, head of the Taliban forces, claimed he had 12,000 fighters, including 500 suicide bombers, and promised escalating violence next spring. Cut those numbers in half or more and the Taliban are still a formidable force.

Parenti interviewed some Taliban fighters:

They talked about U.S. torture and arrests, criticized the government as corrupt and said they wanted a "truly Islamic government." When pressed on what that was, they ducked any specific description. They claimed that they burned schools only because they opposed the mixing of boys and girls. The fighters were local southern Pashtuns. They laid out a clear critique of President Hamid Karzai and his NATO backers. But their alternative was a rather conservative and underdeveloped ideology, long on fatalism and moralism, short on specifics.

Parenti writes about some of the shameful history of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, but he fails to include a more recent -- and especially devastating -- example: When the U.S. manipulated Afghanistan's post-invasion political process to ensure Hamid Karzai became president, shutting out more moderate candidates that were willing to challenge the warlords who are destabilizing the country. The perversion of the process used to establish Afghanistan's current government is detailed in the excellent new book, "Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence."