The point is that the will to be a unified nation in a meaningful sense must be emergent: it must come from within. Afghanistan is going to default back to a loose confederation of quarreling states with a “highly decentralized” government (a government in little more than name only, since it will lack authority) whether we like it or not.

It’s got a lot of parallels. For example Iran. There is no Iranian language. There are lots of little groups around the country, each speaking it’s own language. But breaking it up into feuding statelets would probably be a bad idea. When they tried that with the Ottoman Balkan Territories it took several wars to sort out the borders, including World War One, and it’s still full of touchy political issues. Such as the debate on whether Moldova should be part of Romania.

I agree that a highly decentralized government makes a lot of sense in Afghanistan, but the simple fact is that the Afghans think there should be a guy in Kabul reigning over all of them. That means Afghanistan is not going away anytime soon.

How many of the folks who live in Afghanistan think of themselves primarily as Afghanis? Not many. Tribal and religious associations overwhelmingly trump that sort of identity, and in various regions, the folks there might rather be part of the country that borders them than “Afghanistan.” That’s if they even care about any national identity at all in comparison to tribal/ethnic status.

That these folks are hostile to the various waves of invaders who have come through and have always beaten them off is not the same thing as a national identity. We want a united ongoing “Afghanistan” more than the people there do, and that’s why it won’t work. For some reason it has been declared an important idea and objective by the United States , which leaves America more concerned about it than “Afghanis” themselves. That makes our efforts there folly.

I don’t suggest transitioning things over to the UN to make the effort there more successful. I suggest it as a means of gradually but progressively minimizing our involvement there. Cosmetically, it’s a better choice than a unilateral withdrawal which makes the US look like a-holes.

Staying there under current circumstances is going to be like trying to fill a bucket with a big hole in the bottom. There has been an international parade of
geniuses who have had their hands at breaking the region called Afghanistan, The Soviets, the Taliban, and now the US, to name the latest few. Barack Obama foolishly bought this broken region by campaigning on the idea that it should have been our post 9/11 focus. Now it’s his albatross.

We accomplished a lot, but its too big and backwards of a country to stay there indefinitely. The optium idea is intriguing, but I don’t see them doing that. I hope Obama has more of a strategy than he is letting on.

I strongly disagree with the folks who think we should leave Afghanistan. We’ve had one bad summer. It sucks, but it’s war. Soon the snow will fall, and the Taliban will go to ground for the winter. We’ll have months to think of a better plan, and counter their tactics.

Note that even if we turn it over to the UN we’ll have to be intimately involved in the war. Technically our Army in Korea is under UN Command. Besides we already handed off to an international organization. NATO is formally in charge of Afghan operations. If NATO can’t hold the country there’s no way the UN can do it.

That’s why the US didn’t keep the big spotlight there for very long after 9/11, and it’s why we shouldn’t invest more time, money, and lives trying to make it into another starter democracy.

We should be ALL OVER making it the world’s/the UN’s problem.

Of course it was long enough ago that I don’t remember who was talking and I can’t find statistics essentially making this post pointless, but I thought I’d throw it out there for someone who knows more about the subject.