http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/09252009/watch.htmlI hope you have read his book, "The Places in Between" by now. This guy gets it
and his interview shown last evening shows it.
The link has video and transcript for those without high speed video capabilities.
"So, distinguish Taliban from Al Qaeda. The Taliban, broadly speaking, are Afghans — farmers, subsistence farmers. As I say, most of those people can't find the United States on the map. Al Qaeda, traditionally, are much more educated, middle-class people, often from Egypt, from Saudi Arabia, North Africa. People who have masters degrees, who've lived in Hamburg, who learned to fly airplanes. We can't confuse those two. There's no point us getting into a fight with six million Afghans when our real target is probably a few hundred terrorists who have the capacity to harm the United States. Our real issue is not who wants to harm the United States — our real issue is who can. And how do we prevent those people who actually have that ability to do that."
Snip
"Again, my message is: focus on what we can do. We don't have a moral obligation to do what we can't. People can get very fixed by saying, "But surely you're not saying we ought to do nothing? Surely you're not saying we ought to allow the Taliban to do this or that?" And I just keep saying "ought" implies "can"-- you don't have a moral obligation to do what you can't do."
Snip
"They listen politely, but in the end, of course, basically the policy decision is made. What they would like is little advice on some small bit. I mean, the analogy that one of my colleagues used recently is this: it's as though they come to you and they say, "We're planning to drive our car off a cliff. Do we wear a seatbelt or not?" And we say, "Don't drive your car off the cliff." And they say, "No, no, no. That decision's already made. The question is should we wear our seatbelts?" And you say, "Why by all means wear a seatbelt." And they say, "Okay, we consulted with policy expert, Rory Stewart," et cetera."
Snip
"On the other hand, it's also taught me the kind of scale of challenges you're facing. We arrived and the garbage, the trash was seven feet deep in the streets -- people were climbing over their courtyard walls, because they couldn't get through their doors. We had to clear 17,000 trucks of garbage. And this is only two years ago, 200 meters from the Presidential Palace in the center of Kabul. So, just to get a sense of what very -- there's no sewage system in the capital city, which has got nearly four million people. When you take that on board — the idea that you're somehow going to be able, overnight, to create legitimate, effective, stable state structures, and the writ of the government will run into every ruined village, and that the Taliban will be defeated once and for all, and we're just going to be able to go home in three years time, mission accomplished — is missing the point. This is like talking to somebody, maybe, I don't want to push this analogy too far, but somebody who works in another poor country, like working in sub-Saharan Africa or working in Nepal — it's a long, painful process where even delivering water supply turns out to take a lot of ingenuity and two years of negotiation. "
Read it or watch it. Get up to speed on Afghanistan now.
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