How the “good war” could fail

May 22nd 2008
From The Economist print edition

America needs to lean much harder on Afghanistan's President Karzai

IN CONVENTIONAL wisdom it is the “good war” that was neglected to wage the bad one in Iraq. Afghanistan's Taliban regime had provided al-Qaeda with a haven and refused after the attacks of September 11th to give its leaders up. When America invaded there was no twisting of intelligence, as in Iraq, and no great rift at the United Nations. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both say that one reason to pull American forces smartly out of Iraq is to reinforce a war that is not only more justified but also—given enough troops—more winnable.

The conventional view contains some truth. But whatever the respective merits of Iraq and Afghanistan, it needs adjusting in one vital respect. The NATO forces in Afghanistan are too small, but that is not the chief threat to the West's purposes there. The weakness and corruption of Afghanistan's elected government matter more. This weakness, moreover, is not the inevitable product of Afghanistan's poverty and backwardness, even though these things play a part. It is the result of a failure of political will in Kabul and in Washington. Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai is not doing as much as he should to build an effective administration. And George Bush is not doing as much as he could to twist Mr Karzai's arm.
Stalemate and worse

As our briefing this week reports (see article), the military campaign against the Taliban is going reasonably well in parts of the country. Despite having the use of an invaluable cross-border sanctuary in the Pushtun tribal areas of Pakistan, Taliban fighters have little chance of grabbing any major town or city. An American-led campaign of assassinations has picked off many of their experienced commanders. The Taliban prefers now to avoid frontal clashes and concentrates on laying roadside bombs. For the time being, the danger is less that the government will lose more land to the insurgents, more that the war will settle into a stalemate, one in which the Taliban controls much of the countryside in the Pushtun belt and Mr Karzai's government runs the rest.

(Continued here.)