A sign of a life on the right

George Will argued for an exit from Afghanistan in his WaPo column this morning.

Military historian Max Hastings says Kabul controls only about a third of the country -- "control" is an elastic concept -- and " 'our' Afghans may prove no more viable than were 'our' Vietnamese, the Saigon regime." Just 4,000 Marines are contesting control of Helmand province, which is the size of West Virginia. The New York Times reports a Helmand official saying he has only "police officers who steal and a small group of Afghan soldiers who say they are here for 'vacation.' " Afghanistan's $23 billion gross domestic product is the size of Boise's. Counterinsurgency doctrine teaches, not very helpfully, that development depends on security, and that security depends on development. Three-quarters of Afghanistan's poppy production for opium comes from Helmand. In what should be called Operation Sisyphus, U.S. officials are urging farmers to grow other crops. Endive, perhaps?

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Mullen speaks of combating Afghanistan's "culture of poverty." But that took decades in just a few square miles of the South Bronx. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, thinks jobs programs and local government services might entice many "accidental guerrillas" to leave the Taliban. But before launching New Deal 2.0 in Afghanistan, the Obama administration should ask itself: If U.S. forces are there to prevent reestablishment of al-Qaeda bases -- evidently there are none now -- must there be nation-building invasions of Somalia, Yemen and other sovereignty vacuums?

I honestly don't know a whole lot about the situation in Afghanistan other than that it is a complete cluster-derogatorytermfornonconsensualsexualintercourse. I don't get what we are trying to accomplish and how we imagine that a military operation can make development happen, especially when we are using terrorist-hunting tactics that kill 20 civilians to kill one bad guy. Aside from being a bad ethical policy, I do not see that as bad military or nation building or counter-terrorism strategy.

What happens if we send the Peace Corps to Afghanistan(or transform the military into a purely nation-building, humanitarian unit)? We would put an end to ANY violence coming from our side. We go over with arms out stretched, stop killing people, and build hospitals and schools and homes and skate parks, help cultivate agriculture and education and industry, and work completely with the peaceful element of the Afghan population instead of against it. Or maybe it's time to leave. I just don't think that killing people makes a society, especially a society that is that broken, any more peaceful or prosperous in the long run, and after eight years over there, we could already be having the long run. EIGHT years. That's a long time. Second graders were not alive when U.S. Troops were not in Afghanistan.