NPR just aired a fine story about a US-Afghan raid on a western Afghanistan village last month, looking for a Taliban leader, that left either 40 dead, most of them Taliban fighters–or 90 dead, most of them children, depending on who is telling the story. The lesson to me is that we're doing a lousy job of occupying a country; and I recall statements made by former Ambassador George Lane, a career foreign service officer, at the August 24 event I blogged about before.
Lane emphasized that people hate occupations. "People don't like foreign troops on their soil."
It's just a fundamental factor in national life. "It would bother us if we had foreign troops on our soil, going around policing things, kicking down doors, inspecting your wife's bedroom, I don't think you'd like that." And asking Marines to be policemen, "and they don't even speak the local language," is folly.
The realist ambassador extended this lesson to Iraq, where he thinks we should announce a drawdown starting in three months, and Afghanistan. He asked whether it didn't make sense to work with the Taliban to get Al-Qaeda. The Taliban is a fact of Afghan political life. How much power do we have to change that political landscape; and so why should American troops be working with one faction against another, when the American interest is really: Al-Qaeda. Lane, not surprisingly, took a very dim view of the idea of regime change.
