Beating the Retreat

Beating the retreat in Afghanistan: "The grand project of the Bush administration to create a modern democratic state comes down to much less ambitious scenarios. One is that the Afghan army, its annual cost of nearly $US12 billion mostly funded by the US and more than twice the Afghan government budget, in effect becomes the Afghan state - an irony given that Americans lament the dominance of the army in Pakistan and have been encouraging civilians to assert themselves over the military in places such as South Korea, Indonesia and Egypt. Another is that with the 2014 elections becoming farcical, the government is formed through powerbroking arrangements between ethnic and tribal warlords. In neither case is a walkover for the Taliban likely. With enough foreign support, the regime could hang on indefinitely, fighting a stalemated civil war outside the capital."