Without more troops civil affairs can't do its job in Afghanistan

NY Times:

Even as President Obama leads an intense debate over whether to send more troops to Afghanistan, administration officials say the United States is falling far short of his goals to fight the country’s endemic corruption, create a functioning government and legal system and train a police force currently riddled with incompetence.

Interviews with senior administration and military officials and recent reports assessing Afghanistan’s progress show that nearly seven months after Mr. Obama announced a stepped-up civilian effort to bolster his deployment of 17,000 additional American troops, many civil institutions are deteriorating as much as the country’s security.

Afghanistan is now so dangerous, administration officials said, that many aid workers cannot travel outside the capital, Kabul, to advise farmers on crops, a key part of Mr. Obama’s announcement in March that he was deploying hundreds of additional civilians to work in the country. The judiciary is so weak that Afghans increasingly turn to a shadow Taliban court system because, a senior military official said, “a lot of the rural people see the Taliban justice as at least something.”

Administration officials describe Mr. Obama as impatient with the civilian progress so far. “The president is not satisfied on any of this,” said a senior administration official, who asked for anonymity so that he could more freely discuss internal deliberations at the White House.

The disputed Aug. 20 Afghan election has laid bare the ineffectiveness of the government of President Hamid Karzai, administration officials said, and frozen steps toward reform.

The vote was so tainted by evidence of fraud and irregularities that no clear winner emerged.

Even before the election, a January Defense Department report assessing progress in Afghanistan concluded that “building a fully competent and independent Afghan government will be a lengthy process that will last, at a minimum, decades.”

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One of the reasons Afghanistan is a mess is because it is a mess. If it had effective leadership and a civil culture it would never have deteriorated to the point of a failed state. What is also clear is that a Taliban style government is not the answer to their problems.

If Obama is eager to advance the civilian side of reconstruction, he is going to have to provide the troops that can protect them while also protecting the people and cutting off enemy movement. It is the latter that is the key to all the other things we are pursuing. If we can't cut off enemy movement to contact and their avenues of retreat, we are not going to be able to help the people.

To do that we need more troops. We have to establish a force to space ratio that denies real estate to the enemy for its operations. I don't know why this is so hard to grasp for Obama, but if he does not get it soon he will make his task much harder and the war will last longer and be bloodier.