Kicking the can in Kabul

I’m scrambling to get ready for a trip overseas, so today’s post will be brief. I’ll be participating in a conference in Berlin on "The Public Mission of the SocialSciences and Humanities," co-sponsored by the Social Science Research Counciland the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlinfür Sozialforschung. (You can find some of the papers — including mine — here. I’malso giving a lecture on "The Twilight of the American Era" at the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Auswartige Politik, and then heading off to the University ofLille in France to converse about U.S. Middle East policy. Of course, what I’m really going to be doing is trying to figure out if Europe is really headed over a cliff, and I’ll be especially interested in what my German and French hosts have to say about the momentous decisions that their leaders have to make about Greece, the euro, and the whole EU experiment.

I’ll blog when I can, and there may be one or two guest posts while I’m away, but in the meantime take a look at this short piece on Afghanistan by Columbia’s Graciana del Castillo. It makes lots of smart points about how we ought to be approaching Afghan reconstruction, although I think she exaggerates the ability of the international community to shape events inside the country. But most importantly, the implicit assumption in her analysis is that it is time for a political solution to what is best thought of as a protracted Afghan civil war.

NATO (read: the United States) is not going to defeat the Taliban so long as the Karzai government refuses to reform or share power andas long as the Taliban have safe havens in Pakistan, and there is no reason to think that the latter problem is going to be solved in the foreseeable future. At the same time, the Taliban aren’tstrong or popular enough to take over themselves. In this sort of stalemate, a negotiated settlement to devolve power to local areas, end what many Afghans see as a foreign occupation, and remove the current $100 billion per year drain on theU.S. Treasury is the smart way to go. But I haven’t seen anything that suggests we’re exploring that possibility with any energy, and it makes me wonder what special envoy Marc Grossman has been up to lately.

Given all the other problems on the president’s plate, I’m betting this is one can that just gets kicked down the road into 2013. To little good purpose, I might add.