I wouldn’t ordinarily be writing about the situation in Afghanistan, but since I am familiar with one of their chief exports, hashish ..I have been following the war kind of closely. I think there’s a story here. Or some half-baked ideas. I can never tell. But I was wondering, since when is it the role of army generals to build stable communities when all they’ve been trained to do throughout history is knock them down. So now we’ve put them in charge of ‘social engineering’ ..a practice we abhor in the west ..and rightly so. It doesn’t lead to ‘participatory’ government. Instead, it contributes to feelings of helplessness by replacing traditional customs with circumstances that the local population had no hand in creating ..and over which they have no control.
 

There’s another mission that’s equally unclear to me “Our goal is to break Taliban momentum.” What the hell does that mean in a town where the Taliban have already seized the means of production, which in addition to producing hashish, means subsistence-level bakeries. You think the villagers want to participate in U.S efforts to ‘break Taliban momentum’ when their survival instincts fill them with a sense of foreboding.
 

Last week Obama sacked a commanding general for using the term ‘diplomatic incoherence’ to describe the difference between what is happening in Afghanistan ..and what the U.S government would have us believe is happening in Afghanistan. Call me a cynic, but I don’t believe that giving the military contradictory goals like ‘building stable communities’ and ‘breaking Taliban momentum’ is going to lead to anything like the ‘progress’ I’ve been hearing about from politicians. I’m hunkering down for a long-term disruption in the supply of hash from Afghanistan..