Middle East

The big news over the next couple of days is what has happened in Iraq and Afghanistan, beyond the normal blowing to smithereens of soldiers and civilians. 

Afghanistan's Hamid Kharzai has invited the leader of the Taliban to Kabul to talk about a cease-fire, and possibly integrating the Taliban back into the Afghani government. If they can come to a working agreement, then it would be an Afghan solution and they could join forces to get rid of the foreign al Qaeda forces, as well as having the UN forces withdraw from their country.

This would stop the US from making a commitment to sending more troops into the country, where we have adopted a fighting plan eerily similar to how we fought in Vietnam, not being able to guarantee the safety of the rural population along with accidentally bombing a lot of civilians. The longer you occupy a country the more they will resent you.

This is illustrated by a story I heard on GPS with Fareed Zakaria. A counter insurgency expert related the story of US and Afghan troops going into a rural valley after some Taliban troops. They were pinned down for hours in the valley because the local villagers ran home, picked up their weapons, and joined in the fight. Unfortunately, they joined in on the Taliban side.

Afterwards, the villagers were asked why they joined in because they had previously stated that they did not support the Taliban. They replied that they didn't support them, that this had been the most exciting thing to happen in their valley in a long time and they wanted to have fun. They joined the forces they knew were Afghan, and the US, after all, were foreigners...

It looks like Iraq  will endorse the current troop security agreement, it has just passed in the cabinet, next it has to pass in Parliament. The provisions the US agreed to, was to pull out its troops by the end of 2011, not use Iraq as a base to launch any attacks on its neighbors, and to respect Iraq's sovereignty. 

The pesky problem with trying to set up a democracy in a place that's never had one before is, they just might take you seriously and insist on making their own choices.