Afghan National Army

Commentary By Ron Beasley

The Plan A in Afghanistan is to train the Afghan National Army to defend themselves so we can leave.  There is no Plan B.  As we have said here before Afghanistan is not a nation but a collection of tribes so can you have a national army without a nation?  This via Digby:

As you can see the Afghan soldiers are more interested in getting stoned than fighting the Taliban.  To make matters even worse the British can't tell the Afghans where they are going because they will tell the Taliban they are coming.  Digby:

As someone who has spent time in Afghanistan, Howie pointed out that the thing that nobody seems to want to admit about Afghanistan is that it's not actually a country, its a bunch of tribes. And everybody's stoned --- their culture is organized around growing opium and they have the best hash in the world.

This is not a value judgment. It's just an observation of a strong, thousand year old culture and thinking US soldiers can change it in a "couple, three years" is so absurd you just know they aren't even remotely serious about doing it.

Now the Generals and the Hawks know this - they may be a lot of things but dumb is not one of them.  They know there will never be an Afghan National Army to fight the Taliban so yes, they are lying to us.  The Generals need a war to keep them in the media limelight and the Corporatocracy needs pipelines and profits.

Comments

[Lex]

Though i've mentioned it in writing, i think the meme of the drugged Afghan Army is the wrong path to take. As i pointed out when i blogged similarly, the ANA smoking hash isn't much different than the behavior of US servicemen in South East Asia a generation ago. And it only takes a few minutes on a site like Live Leak to find current servicemen who are clearly envious of the Afghan marijuana fields; if they weren't being tested, they'd probably be great friends with ANA guys and blaze together.

According to the DWT post that Digby references, all Afghan men get high...and since Islam doesn't prohibit it, we might assume that even Talibs get high. They seem to be able to fight decently.

That is, the problem isn't the hash.

Finally, the reference about "the best hash in the world" is almost 40 years out of date. Afghanistan does not have the best hash in the world (maybe the most). Northern California and the Netherlands have hash of a far higher quality than anything produced in Afghanistan. Any major city in the US probably has better hash if you know the right people.