Meanwhile, back in Marja...

Last February, I grudgingly allowed that General McChrystal should get his chance at pacifying Marja. Well, he's had his chance. Before we escalate even further and move on to Kandahar, maybe it would be a good idea to see how Marja turned out.

The Taliban actually left for a while, but now they're back. The Afghan national police push the locals around during the day, and the Taliban do it by night. Oh, and remember that "government in a box" that was all ready to move in as soon as Marja was reclaimed? It seems the box must have leaked, because a good many of the officials never made it to Marja — they're still back in Kabul, although they are collecting their government salaries for doing such good work down south.

So the schedule for Kandahar has been pushed back a bit. I suppose there's no need for a "government in a box" there, because Ahmed Wali Karzai will continue to run the place just as he always has.

Making things even more interesting, U.S. geologists estimate close to a trillion dollars in mineral wealth is just waiting to be dug up in Afghanistan. Just think of all the splendid corruption that will bring. Hell, we couldn't even keep rampant corruption out of our own Minerals Management Service — and I really don't see a pack of Karzai cousins taking too much trouble to preserve the environment when the mining begins.

Well, at least they don't have an ocean to pollute.

Hooray for Dennis!

Arguably, Dennis Kucinich is America's least corrupt politician. No plutocrat ever benefits from the actions Kucinich takes in the House, so it's pretty obvious he hasn't been bought.

His bill to end American involvement in Afghanistan, as everyone expected, went down to resounding defeat in the House yesterday, and Afghan corruption king Hamid Kharzai's tongue kiss with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (as documented on the front page of the New York Times) does not seem to have changed the numbers at all.

I'm still anxiously awaiting McChrystal's "government in a box" for Marja — not yet installed in the newly "liberated" town. When Karzai showed up there a couple of days ago, he was not exactly greeted with enthusiasm, and easily could have been run out of town on a rail had he not been in the company of U.S. Marines. One certainty, however, is that nobody in Marja wants the unabashedly corrupt and brutal Afghan police around, no matter how "well" they've lately been trained by American contractors.

Call me a cynic — everyone does — but I'm still inclined to believe that the main reason we remain in Afghanistan is because the usual war contractors continue to rake in vast profits, and use those profits to elect compliant politicians who will keep the profits flowing. Afghanistan's corruption is blatant and shameless. Our system is more subtle, but no less corrupt.

McChrystal and Marja

If General Stanley A. McChrystal actually makes a success of the Marja invasion — which is to say, actually keeping it rather than just conquering it — I might become a convert to the Obama plan for Afghanistan. One thing McChrystal already is doing which I find quite encouraging is redefining Afghans for the troops.

Typically, when an army invades a country, the inhabitants automatically become "the other." Military training encourages such thinking, which makes it possible for soldiers to kill efficiently without excessive guilt. McChrystal is making a concerted effort to teach his troops to discriminate between enemy fighters and civilians, minimizing civilian casualties. His effort to help the troops understand that "the population is the prize" is almost completely novel in the history of warfare. Will it work? We'll see.

I'll also be interested to see McChrystal's "government in a box, ready to roll in" when hostilities subside. If he truly has managed to locate enough non-corrupt Afghan administrators and policemen to run Marja without alienating and antagonizing the locals, that would be another genuinely novel accomplishment. Will he be able to come up with more, to govern the other towns in the Helmand River Valley that will need to be pacified? What will keep them honest, right there in the midst of Afghanistan's most important opium growing region, once NATO forces have moved on?

Frankly, I'm not especially hopeful — but I suppose there's no choice but to give McChrystal a chance.