There’s not much to show for the last eight years of Western presence in the country and there’s little time to turn things around.
Hamid Karzai's inevitable election results ground towards an inevitable outcome last month the real verdict on his governance was being played out on the streets and the dusty hamlets of Afghanistan.
In the official tally Karzai was showing a modest plurality but the more important figures were the horrendous body counts among innocent Afghan citizens and the Western soldiers sent to 'rescue' the country from what has been its destiny over the centuries — a faction-ridden melange of tribes and warlords all of whom seem to have little interest in the rest of the world unless their intervention helps them pursue their own interests.
The West is bent on replicating the model of democracy in Afghanistan that it has already tried to apply in both Pakistan and Iraq — find a moderate figure to act as leader and attempt to wrap a unified nation around their chosen one before taking the fight to the perceived foe. The problem is that once the chosen figure establishes some sort of a following in said state, with or without Western help, then that leader tends to pursue a nationalist agenda — not surprisingly — that is not necessarily in accord with the original game plan. That has already happened to some degree with the Maliki government in Baghdad. In Pakistan there remains a good deal of doubt over whether the Americans are really in control of what is happening in the northern reaches of the country where the fight is being taken to the Taliban and Al Qaeda elements there.
http://newageislam.com/afghanistan--flawed-occupation/war-on-terror/d/1777
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