So we are ramping up troop levels to 100,000 in order to pursue 50-100 men who may not even be in the country? This is not particularly reassuring in terms of the soundness of US strategy.
But perhaps there is another justification, to wit: "Our purpose, our whole mission there, is to make sure that Al Qaeda never finds another safehaven from which to attack this country. . . . And the measure of success for us is: do you have an Afghanistan that is stable enough to make sure that never happens."
So we need a huge troop presence in a failed state to ensure AQ can't base there? Setting aside Taliban disavowals of AQ by the Taliban dating to 2008, and setting aside the dubious notion that we can create a functioning state out of thin air based on the twin pillars of the use of military force and the Karzai "administration", instability, as a criterion for such a substantial deployment, is questionable to say the least, taking in, as it does, quite a large number of other similar states (Somalia, Chad, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Congo, CAR, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Yemen, to name a few).
And does anyone, anywhere, really believe the government of Afghanistan will, in the near or medium term, be able "to deploy an effective army and police force to maintain stability"?
In reply to the assertion that it could do so in the long term:
What is the analysis of how the Karzai government will acheive these ends long term, given the relevant regional factors (including Pashtun nationalism, tensions with, and the historical experience of, the North, the competing interests of India and Pakistan, ISI interference and support, the connections of the Karzai government to corruption, electoral fraud, narcotrafficking and perceptions of general incompetence, tensions with the Pakistani Pashtun, the local effects of collateral damage killings during foreign military operations, interference from Iran, etc.)? And what is the conception of long term in this context?
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