A military solution for Afghanistan?

Amir Taheri has a good piece today in the NY Post answering the conventional wisdom that there is no military solution in Afghanistan.

IN Kabul these days, those wishing to sound knowledgeable fire one phrase at visiting reporters: "This has no military solution!" One hears it from President Hamid Karzai, UN "experts" and diplomats. Yet they appear stuck when asked: What precisely is the "this" that has no military solution?

While it is true that pacifying Afghanistan can't be done solely by military means, it cannot be done without first defeating the insurgents in order to safeguard the populace. Then you can focus on all of the quality of life issues that will seal the deal.

The Afghan experience could be divided into three phases. In the first phase, the US, backed by the Afghan Northern Alliance, managed to flush the Taliban out of Kabul, gain control of the country and establish a new regime.

The second phase, between 2004 and 2008, saw America and NATO focusing on such nonmilitary issues as creating a new administrative machine, raising a new Afghan army and police and inventing a new judiciary.

All that was done under the assumption that the UN-backed NATO presence was a peacekeeping, rather than a peace-enforcing, mission. The bulk of NATO forces behaved more like the Salvation Army than a fighting machine in a real war.

This flies in the face of the argument that W took his eye off the ball with his excursion into Iraq. But it has the advantage of being true. Bush was involved in that thing he is always accused of not doing, multi-lateralism. He worked with our NATO allies and divvied up responsibilities for building a functioning society. This proved a bigger challenge than hoped and progress was minimal.

Add to this Pakistan's abdication of control for the tribal areas and allowing the Talibs & AQ a place to call their own and you have a recipe for failure. Starting in 2006 a full scale resurgence of the insurgency began and we have been seeing an increase in violence ever since. We began to actively counter this and with an increase of our troop strength to 68,000 have begun to take the necessary steps to defeat it. But we need to add 5-8 more brigades if we are going to move the extremists out of all the places where they now are operating. All the civilian surge and other smart power activities are dependent on a security environment that will get the risk-averse State and other agency folks outside the wire.