what im trying to say is everyones getting mixed up with lots of miss information,the photo’s they dont matter,we’ll they do but,the drones,the tribal stuff,the blankets,hamid karzi,look at the bigger picture,all this has been done before,AMERICAN FORIEGN POLICY
its like we debatting the washing up that has built up in the sink over a month,how is it going to get washed,what should be binned,who should we put in charge of getting it done,what resources do we have,who is suffering as a consequence, who has not a clean spoon,when nobody is asking why did this happen in the first place.somebody being lazy an taking the pi**.

I think the contradiction here is this: you agree it’s important to prevent Al Qaeda (and, I assume, by extension the Taliban) from gaining control of those outlying areas, but you don’t want to see time and energy wasted on Karzai’s government making futile attempts to control them, either. So how do we prevent the Taliban from controlling them, if not by making use of the central government? Quilts alone won’t do it — Jacob made some good points about that below, and besides, sewing a handmade quilt is an enormous job. Getting hundreds of thousands of them made by winter would require forced labor on a scale not seen since slavery.

Look, we’ve got a lot of different threads going here now — the recent deaths of those civilians, the release of the photos, Afghanistan’s ethnic diversity… There’s so easy solution to all this. And there isn’t really any straightforward, easy criticism either.

I think the problem is that, we tried the “leave the government in Kabul” tactic. What happened? The Taliban/Al Qaeda hung out in those ethnic minority parts until the troop numbers went down.

I guess I’m a little clueless about this ethnic diversity, but if a people are so impoverished that they cannot make their own quilts to stay warm in the winter time, are we then affecting change by sending some to them? Should we not consider the socio-economic factors that are leading to such poverty? When we’re done feeling better about ourselves, and the quilts rot (literally and figuratively speaking), what will these people have–more foreign aid? Doesn’t it make sense to unite them–even loosely–under a single, stable, democratically-elected structure? If not, aren’t we just jerking ourselves off by being over there at all.

From everything thing I’ve heard from friends deployed to Iraq/Afghanistan, we’re not in the business of villager killing. It’s amazing how much an combatant looks like a “villager” to an outsider (say, a BBC reporter) when he hides his AK-47. Thankfully, the locals have a tendency to know who isn’t a “local”, and I think American policy (in Iraq, at least) has been working to that end. The Al-Anbar awakening showed us that, if we work with the local people (particularly local leaders), they’ll quickly identify the six Lebanese/Iranian/Syrian/Pakistani men who moved in right around the time the IEDs started getting planted. (I’ll quickly note: NYT didn’t have the balls to embed someone in the Anbar province in the time leading up the awakening. You know who was there? Christian Science Monitor and Army Times. Everyone else was off thumping their chest in Baghdad’s green zone, hearing about the war as second hand as almost everyone else).

At the end of the day, someone is giving up time–probably quilt-making time, if our proposed aid efforts are to be given merit–to crawl up mountains outside of American FOBs and firing old soviet rockets at our soldiers. These are not f*#king goat herders. Maybe they were, but they’re not any more. Even semi-successful farmers don’t have that kind of free time. If anything, these are probably the same guys threatening to kill the goat herder’s family if they say anything to the coalition forces. And I think our “policy” is to do our best to mitigate THAT guy. Because frankly, if we leave and THAT guy is still around (or not given a democratic outlet for his/her grievances), the quilts will just get stolen anyway–and the quilt owner will probably be raped.

What’s NOT important is helping Hamid Karzai’s government extend control over ethnic minority parts of Afghanistan that no Kabul government has ever managed to govern. Doing so is impossible, and just breeds resentment that strengthens the true extremists.

Read Rory Stewart’s The Places In Between to get a sense of just how diverse Afghanistan is – there are several nations in one, vast territory.

Winning hearts and minds is so much more important than killing villagers. I’d like to see a shipment of hundreds of thousands of handmade American quilts go directly to villagers in the Afghan mountains before the next winter.

Also interesting to note that while the Beltway crowd plays politics, over 100 civilian Afghan villagers, including dozens of children, were blown to bits in a U.S. missile attack.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/world/asia/15farah.html?ref=global-home

U.S. policy in Afghanistan is so wrong-headed it makes me sick.

http://gawker.com/5253864/if-youre-angry-about-the-torture-photos-youre-being-played-by-obama?skyline=true&s=x