The Diminished Expectations of Nation Building

By Steve Hynd

Not Denmark, nor Switzerland in the Hindu Kush - more like Kosovo, Mosul or Columbia.

Afghanistan could look like Iraq, the Balkans or Central America if NATO succeeds in its mission there, the alliance's top commander said on Monday.

"It will be a world in which there is a central government, there are elections, there is reasonable control in the security sector, there's still some terrorist incidents . . . it's not perfect, but it's a functioning democracy," U.S. Admiral James Stavridis said.

"There are tensions, there are problems but it's vastly improved over where it was five or 10 years ago . . . It's got elections, but it's not finding 10-20,000 killed a year in civil activity. It's a sense of progress, a sense of movement . . . corruption is reduced, there is a sense of governance in the majority of the country."

Stavridis was replying to a questioner at a seminar in Brussels who asked how he would define success in Afghanistan, where U.S. President Barack Obama is sending 30,000 more U.S. troops to tackle a widening Taliban insurgency.

"I think that's achievable. I think we can succeed in that regard," he said.

Stavridis is NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), its senior uniformed man, and has a long history of strategic planning in the War On Terror^tm. Yet all he's willing to say is that the best case scenario is for Afghanistan maybe (he thinks NATO can succeed at this) to be turned into a nation that is still plagued with corruption, still seeing terrorist attacks on its populace, still a nexus in the international drug and smuggling trades, still a human rights disaster zone, still teetering on the brink of civil war or military junta, still full of unclaimed spaces able to provide safe havens to terrorists. It just won't be as bad as it is now.

And the price tag for this decade long project will be hundreds or thousands of Afghan and NATO lives as well as more than $1 trillion dollars.

Wow. I'm underwhelmed.