wash cycle being the mid east expert that you are im curious how you feel about the increased american presence in afghanistan.. to me it seems a better situation then iraq with no leaders to depose and whatnot but still im not sure how i feel about american military intervention anywhere at this point cuz ya know WHEN CHICKENS COME TO  ROOST

obviously im being pretty vague on how i feel about the subject but uh i just remember that article you wrote about afghanistan and how much it rocked so yea id like to know your opinion and i didnt really wanna make a whole topic for it ya know

we're displacing hundreds and hundreds of people over there with Pakistani f-16s and US drones and killing innocent poppy farmers left and right. Pakistanis don't want us there because we're actually increasing the Taliban by displacing so many people, blowing their only sources of income up and leaving them with no alternative between starvation and joining the Taliban.

     Well more troops are technically a good thing, but they won't lead to any sort of lasting gains if the whole strategy doesn't change.  The government in Kabul has extremely limited resources and no real military.  The various military groups that do exist within Afghanistan are lead by the same people who were in power in 1993.  They are the same exact people (with a couple omissions) who misgoverned the region so poorly that they made the Taleban seem reasonable and just.  Essentially the grand strategy in Afghanistan has been an absolute disaster and Najibullah's government has basically been recreated.  This is very nearly as bad as Taleban rule.  
     I guess the best one can hope for is economic stabalization with an increased troop presence, but with the situation across the border in Pakistan, I do not know how that would work.  

     By the way, as far as leaders to depose, the Afghan situation is much worse than Iraq.  Afghanistan had/has no real centralized government.  Even under Daoud Khan's reign much of the state apparatus was illusionary.  What it does have now are a number of "warlords."  The United States refused to depose these individuals (many of whom, had been supported by US/Pakistani/Saudi/Chinese aid in the past) and thus they continue to rule.  Their rule is symbolically and physically associated with the break down and fragmentation of the country and the creation of the mind blowing level of human suffering that have existed in the region for decades.

I think its too early to tell if our increase in troop levels will actually do any good, I think on the whole we need to move into a new phase of approach to Afghanistan and by that I mean we need to start nation building and as soon as possible. However, you cant build the apparatuses of states, nor roads, hospitals, schools or public works projects unless the country is stable and the situation under control. I mean I sound like some burgeouis technocrat in saying so, but afghanistan has seen nearly continual warfare since the 70s and the country was hardly modernized to begin with. Afghanistan has a long way to go before the situation improves, and I hope that between the US stepping up troop levels and the Pakistani army cracking down on the Taleban in the frontier provinces that security wont be as much of an issue, but the rivalry between Pashtun and non-Pashtun Afghans is probably never going away so its going to be interesting to see if a stable nation-state will ever actually come to fruition in the region.

in the end, afghanistan has a shitload of strikes against it, economically it has been ravaged, the country has very limited arable land, a huge internal refugee population, inter-ethnic strife, its not modernized, anywhere from 5-20% of its territory is covered in mines depending on who you ask, and its currently run by what amounts to a bunch of corrupt mafiosos with large standing militias and lots of weaponry so the whole thing is just like a big clusterfuck of an example of what happens when sphere of influence conflicts never get resolved.

I called it

the 40 day mark after the death of Neda has sparked protests and demonstrations as well as crackdowns and arrests

http://pakshha.wordpress.com/2009/07/30/breaking-news-protests-around-mosala-square-in-tehran/

http://niacblog.wordpress.com/

the government is well aware of the incredible importance of these large public mourning ceremonies and their role in bringing down the shah during the revolution so it should be interesting to see how they handle this, cause its going to keep happening for another couple of months given that people are still dying like every day in the prisons now