America needs an Afghan strategy, not an alibi - Henry A. Kissinger

I supported President Obama's decision to double American forces in Afghanistan and continue to support his objectives. The issue is whether the execution of the policy is based on premises that do not reflect Afghan realities, at least within the deadline that has been set.
The central premise is that, at some early point, the United States will be able to turn over security responsibilities to an Afghan government and national army whose writ is running across the entire country. This turnover is to begin next summer.

Neither the premise nor the deadline is realistic.

Afghanistan has never been pacified by foreign forces. At the same time, the difficulty of its territory combined with the fierce sense of autonomy of its population have historically thwarted efforts to achieve a transparent central government.

The argument that a deadline is necessary to oblige President Hamid Karzai to create a modern central government challenges experience. What weakens transparent central governance is not so much Karzai's intentions, ambiguous as they may be, but the structure of his society, run for centuries on the basis of personal relationships. Demands by an ally publicly weighing imminent withdrawal to overthrow established patterns in a matter of months may prove beyond any leader's capacities.

Every instinct I have rebels against this conclusion. But it is essential to avoid the debilitating domestic cycle that blighted especially the Vietnam and Iraq wars, in which the public mood shifted abruptly -- and often with little relation to military realities -- from widespread support to assaults on the adequacy of allies to calls for an exit strategy with the emphasis on exit, not strategy.

Afghanistan is a nation, not a state in the conventional sense. The writ of the Afghan government is likely to run in Kabul and its environs, not uniformly in the rest of the country. The attainable outcome is likely to be a confederation of semi-autonomous, regions configured largely on the basis of ethnicity, dealing with each other by tacit or explicit understandings. American counterinsurgency strategy -- no matter how creatively applied -- cannot alter this reality. ........... - How to repair our Afghan strategy

The writer was secretary of state from 1973 to 1977.

CIA hires Xe to guard facilities in Afghanistan - Jeff Stein