"The 'good war' isn't"

Patrick seale, in the Baltimore Sun.

"Whatever the outcome of last week's Afghan elections - the results are due Sept. 17 - the cruel fact is that the Afghan war is a deadly trap. It makes no difference whether Hamid Karzai or his former foreign minister Abdallah Abdallah is declared the winner. Rather than pouring in more troops, the United States and its NATO allies should urgently seek an exit strategy from that unfortunate country.

The war in Afghanistan has lasted eight years, with no end in sight. It has claimed 780 American lives and more than 200 British ones. It has cost the American taxpayer $220 billion which, had it been spent on development, could have transformed not only Afghanistan but its neighbors as well. The war is being widely compared with Vietnam. The time to get out must surely be approaching.

Waged to overthrow the Taliban, the war has mushroomed into a ferocious yet unwinnable campaign against the fiercely Islamic and xenophobic Pashtuns, who straddle the Afghan-Pakistan border and are Afghanistan's dominant community.

......The longer the war continues, the more Afghans and Pakistanis are killed and the more intrusive the Western military presence, the greater the likelihood that enraged Muslims in different parts of the world will want to hit back at the "enemy." ....

What Mr. Obama and his Western allies should urgently devise is a new formula. Instead of waging war, they should summon Afghanistan's principal tribal leaders, ... pledge to pour in billions of dollars in development aid could be a great incentive to the Afghans to sort out their quarrels and govern themselves without outside interference."