(November 2, 2009 - Photo by Majid Saeedi/Getty Images AsiaPac)
President Karzai dropped a bomb on the Obama administration’s plan for Afghanistan yesterday by telling reporters that his country will need assistance for at least the next 15 years to be able to fund and staff a sustainable army independently from NATO and US forces. To be fair, this doesn’t mean that we will have 100,000 troops on the ground there, but it does mean that Karzai expects us to foot a substantial portion of the bill long after we are gone. This is obviously a cleverly-timed maneuver by Karzai who knows that he now has President Obama hanging off a cliff just days after he announced his plans for a troop escalation. It will also give Democrats much to talk about in the days to come as they were already clambering about the cost of the continued effort there. Its funny how they only worry about money when it comes to military spending, but I digress.
Even though the statements by Karzai appear somewhat offputting at a casual glance, when taken in context they really don’t seem that unreasonable. Karzai is talking about building an army from the ground up. The reality of that is simply that it takes time to make that happen. Retired Major General James Marks told Fox News that the average non-commissioned officer in our own military takes about 15 years to become fully trained and capable of legitimately leading substantial operations. He stated that he believed that the 15-year timeline is unfortunate, but certainly expected.
The truth here is that this is one of those things that NO ONE really wants to talk about, and it is evidence that nation-building needs to be a policy that is buried in annuls of American history. I genuinely support the effort in Afghanistan, and while I am not a fan of subsidizing that government’s military on any level, it may be the bitter pill that we all must swallow to prevent that region from returning to its status as a terrorist training hotbed.
