Crossing my fingers on Afghanistan

My support for Barack Obama is well-documented here, but after seeing last night's speech at West Point I'm still not sure where he's going with the war in Afghanistan. Obviously he faces a highly unenviable situation: he can't withdraw troops quickly and just walk away, as Afghanistan's weak, corrupt and questionably-legitimate central government would soon collapse, returning the Taliban to power and giving al Qaeda a comfortable place of refuge; and he can't order a large-scale invasion which would rightly be seen as heavy-handed colonialism by the Afghan people and the rest of the world, and might not eliminate the scourge of Islamist extremism anyway. For all the talk of this being a fight against al Qaeda, the U.S. troops mostly find themselves in the middle of a civil war in a historically unstable region, and if two warring sides are bent on killing each other there's really nothing a peacekeeping force like the U.S. and its NATO allies can do about it.

The thing that most concerns me is the reliance of Obama's plan on the self-sufficiency of Afghanistan's internal security forces. Unlike Iraq, Afghanistan doesn't have a tradition of a large standing army which can be recruited to fight the insurgency. From what I've heard, the Afghan forces are often just as corrupt as the Karzai government itself, meaning that we face to prospect of handing off security responsibility to a bunch of thugs and thieves. I'm also concerned how viable a strong centralized government there could possibly be. At least Iraq has the great advantage of vast oil resources which have the potential to finance security forces and social programs. Afghanistan doesn't have that. Instead its most lucrative product is opium, whose trafficking is controlled by regional warlords who thus hold great power in the country and can dictate their demands to the central government, and not vice versa.

On the other hand, I'm encouraged by claims that U.S. aid (both humanitarian and development) will increasingly not be funnelled through the central government (where it would likely be pilfered) but instead to regional and local authorities who have proven themselves willing and able to responsibly deliver that aid to everyday Afghan people. Raising the standard of living of Afghans is a critical factor in negating the allure of the extremists, and that aspect of Obama's plan is far more important than increasing our military presence.

Obama might have no choice but to insitute the troop surge that he's outlined. But if drawing down troops starting in 2011 is dependent on the Afghans (including Karzai or whomever might succeed him) taking primary responsibility for their own destiny, then I'm less than optimistic. I don't see anything in Afghanistan right now that encourages me to believe such stability and self-sufficiency is possible. Karzai has to be sternly told to get his house in order, weed out and punish official corruption, and quickly develop the military capability to suppress extremism, or else the U.S. will pull out in 2011 whether Afghanistan is ready to stand on its own or not. Our military presence cannot be an open-ended commitment, nor one that is contingent on Afghan self-sufficiency.

Obama has few if any good options. So while I'm trusting his judgment, I'm also crossing my fingers.