LONG AND
WINDING ROADS
HUFFINGTON
10.14.12
DMITRY KOSTYUKOV/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
U.S. Marines
patrol as
Afghans dig
irrigation canals
to help cultivate
their land.
under the right circumstances.
“In the context of good institutions, of
effective security, of checks and balances
on the way that money is spent, of clear
limits, there is the potential to do something good with development,” Gordon
told me. “But none of those preconditions
have really ever existed in Afghanistan.”
It also didn’t help American stabilization efforts that they were consistently
undermined by Western military activity. In recent years, civilian casualties
caused by Americans have gone down,
but deaths and disruptions from night
raids, airstrikes and drones have remained a constant source of disaffection for Afghans. Last year, Nato aerial
strikes accounted for 187 deaths, or
nearly half of the civilian casualties attributed to pro-government forces,
according to the UN. (The Taliban is
thought to be responsible for 10 times as
many civilian deaths.) At one point last
year, a sequence of events including the
burning of Qurans at a U.S. military base
and an errant airstrike that killed 16
civilians prompted President Karzai to
describe the Americans as “demons.”
“International forces eventually realized the devastating impact this public
blowback was having for broader strategic goals,” says Erica Gaston, a longtime
Afghanistan researcher who studied civilian casualties for the Open Society Foundations. “But at that point it was hard to
turn back years of brewing resentment
and mistrust bred by what was largely