I want to avoid being a one-issue blogger, but I have received several requests for more details about my pessimism in Marjah, and Afghanistan more generally. 

Let’s say you want to build a house. You have the funds to hire everyone you need, and you’re a lucky person, because you happen to know the very best carpenter on earth – Norm Abram. Norm agrees to work on your house, but after erecting a few frame pieces you immediately have him switch to painting unfinished rooms. After a delay, you finally allow him to return to carpentry – but only on one single bedroom. Meanwhile, in all the debate about Norm’s role, you neglected to hire a real contractor to lay the foundation. Instead, you just poured some concrete that you had lying around and called it a day.

This is clearly not the way to build a house. Anyone who has ever picked up a hammer can predict how this project will end, and it won’t be a pretty sight. Unfortunately, if you’ll forgive the somewhat strained Friedman-esque analogy, this is exactly what the U.S. is doing in Afghanistan.

Norm, our master carpenter, is the U.S. military. Just like Norm, they are the best in the world at what they do – fighting. But in Afghanistan they have been engaging in nation-building (even though nobody in Washington is willing to use that term). And as good as the military is at fighting, it is not trained or equipped for development work. Having troops do nation-building is akin to taking your master carpenter and asking him to paint. Not only is it outside his core competencies, there are other people who specialize is doing it the right way. Instead of professional painters, consider professional aid workers – the people who work for international NGOs or government organizations like USAID. They have spent their lives studying and practicing development, and are clearly more qualified to undertake those tasks in Afghanistan. Yet instead of utilizing our aid workers, or professional painters, we are letting the military and Norm do unfamiliar work.