Why do this now?

A better question might be "why didn't I do this months ago?" For nearly a year now, I've been worried about where things were headed in Afghanistan. Here in the United States, I feared that the fiasco in Iraq had allowed us to slip into wishful notions of Afghanistan as our "good war."

My concerns went past the most obvious one: that America's invasion had yet to result in the capture of bin Laden.

No, my concerns were even more basic. I feared that any war that suffered from such neglect was destined to drift into serious trouble. So I started reading up on Afghanistan. Books, of course. But also newspapers, blogs, and magazines. Even government reports. It was in a 6/18/08 U.S. Government Accountability Office report that I saw a single photo that seemed to corroborate my fears. The report explained the photo like this: "more than 1,500 trucks have been on hand and ready for issue since late 2007, but the Afghan Minister of Interior has delayed distribution of these vehicles until adequate accountability procedures and driver training are established in the target districts."

It was a small thing, but I sensed it was symptomatic of bigger problems.

In hindsight, I should have blogged about the photo back then. I write for Huffington Post and it would have been a simple thing to type something up. But then, as now, Afghanistan daunted me. I felt so ignorant that I didn't even feel qualified to raise questions.

So spring turned to summer and summer turned to fall before I wrote my one post about Afghanistan. During those months, news from Afghanistan made it clear America was not winning its "good war." It was reassuring to see both Barack Obama and John McCain discussing the need to craft a better Afghanistan policy. But, as I read more, I worried the candidates were underestimating the challenge in Afghanistan. I summarized my concerns in an e-mail to a retired U.S. military officer, an expert in counterinsurgency who had helped me come up with an Afghanistan reading list. My e-mail to him included these two paragraphs:

I have to tell you that Afghanistan scares the crap out of me. In crucial ways, it seems like a tougher problem than Iraq. While it's plainly a country that you can find on a map, the place seems to lack any cohesiveness, any homegrown reason to even exist as a single country. I worry about how we can make things work in such a place. I find myself wishing we'd waited very, very patiently for bin Laden & Co. to slip up and taken them out without invading and taking on responsibility for the whole mess of a country.

I hope you are right, that Iraq does hold lessons for Afghanistan. My fear, with troop levels now falling according to schedule in Iraq, is that Afghanistan may offer lessons for Iraq: namely, as the Taliban are showing, that you sometimes can't tell for years whether a routed enemy is actually beaten for good.

That still sums up my basic assessment. I'd like to find reasons to see things differently. If I find those reasons, I'll be documenting them here. The search will be time well spent.

The need to spend time productively is the most immediate reason for starting this blog tonight. I have squandered the last two nights of my life getting drawn into fleeting, trivial sideshows of the American political scene. The result was this and this -- neither of which you should bother to click on, precisely because they deal with fleeting, trivial nonsense. This blog is partly a check against getting diverted by the fluff of politics. The reminder that I am out in the world proclaiming myself to be an "AfPak Ignoramus" will hopefully steer me back to picking up a book or listening to a lecture or maybe eventually to trying to learn Pashto or Urdu or some other language that would deepen my understanding.

Thank you for reading. I hope to make it worth your time.