Steve Chapman on America’s Wasted Effort in Afghanistan

It’s
hard to see the value of our mission in Afghanistan when our
partners are so impervious to our best efforts, writes Steve
Chapman. The Special Inspector General reported that we have gotten
a pitiful return on a $200 million literacy program for the Afghan
army. The exceedingly modest goal—getting all of the Afghan
soldiers to read at a first-grade level and half of them to read at
a third-grade level—turns out to be “unrealistic” and
“unattainable.” The Afghan army “is actually far from ready for
transition at the end of 2014,” warned Anthony Cordesman of the
Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington last
year. The national police, he concluded, are worse. Here’s an
option: We could acknowledge that there are some things even the
world’s sole superpower can’t do, and fixing Afghanistan is one of
them.

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