Brown’s Plans for Exit
Maybe a conference is a good idea. Unfortunately conferences have a bad record for solving problems, but in the end, short of conquest, people have to talk to get a solution.
Afghanistan, with its epic history and its unique poppy based economy requires all who meddle there to recognise one simple fact of life, whether they like it or not. The Taliban is built around Afghan tribal culture and the warlord tradition and no settlement is possible with out its stamp of approval. They now have the initiative and they will not let go. NATO is utterly unable to raise the million plus troops necessary to impose a settlement by force and keep it in place. If we exit snubbing the Taliban thay will hang Karzai and his corrupt henchmen and take over as soon as we are gone. They did it to Najibullah. Their predecessors the Mujahidin brought the Russians to exactly the position we are in now, before they set off home.
Money is the key. If we can help them set up an economy which can bring prosperity with a crop other than poppies, that and that alone will gradually ease the Afghans out of a medieval mindset into modern times. An intersting footnote is that the Columbian drug barons and the Taliban depend, like Al Capone before them with liquour,on thier product being illegal and subject to criminal black marketing and distribution. Making all drugs legal but controlled, would do more to sort this out than anything else. Unfortunatley the failure to see the lack of connection between illegality and reducing consumption is intellectually a gap too wide for the legislators to bridge.
I remember my father telling me how when he visited New York on business during Prohibiton, that friends had fixed him membership of an illegal bar so that he would not be thisty. He always felt safe there because it was mostly full of New York cops.