By Dave Anderson:
USA Today is reporting on a poll which shows Afghans are giving increasing legitimacy to acts of violence and resistance to the American and ISAF occupation and counter-insurgency campaign. The Taliban and other non-governmental and anti-governmental armed groups are gaining legitimacy as the general population sees their actions as justified resistance against foreign occupiers. That is a major failure of the American counter-insurgency campaign where the goal is to physically and morally seperate the general population from the insurgents.
The poll found 27% of Afghans see insurgent attacks as justified, up from 8% last year. The sharp increase this year brings the number back to levels seen earlier in the nine-year war.
The poll, which has a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points, was based on face-to-face interviews with a random sample of nearly 1,700 Afghan adults in all 34 of the country's provinces. It was conducted from Oct. 29-Nov. 13 by ABC News, the BBC, ARD German TV and The Washington Post....
Just 36% of those polled expressed confidence in the U.S. and NATO to bring stability, down by 12 percentage points from last year and down by 31 percentage points since 2006. The survey also said 73% favor a negotiated settlement with the Taliban, up by 13 percentage points since 2007.
Most of the Afghanistan has long recognized that the Taliban, and conservative Pashtun interests are a long term player in Afghanistan, and therefore they need to be included in the national elite. This means cutting a deal that brings in the vast majority of the Pashtuns by guaranteeing their core interests while allowing everyone to pile on against any hold-outs who hold critical economic or geographic chokepoints. Not cutting a deal with the Taliban, or insisting on a deal that requires pre-emptive surrender is an extremist position in the context of Afghanistan; it is also the American position imposed by domestic political concerns.
Pushing an extreme policy that is not acceptable to most Afghanis (complete exclusion of Taliban/conservative Pashtun tribal interests from a final settlement) with heavily armed foreigners is not a viable long term strategy for the United States. We'll waste another couple thousand Western lives, untold thousands of Afghani lives and half a trillion dollars banging our head into that wall instead of admitting that American power has real limits, especially in areas that are objectively tertiary interests.
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