The United States is bleeding cash in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. More importantly, our soldiers have invested incalculable amounts of their own blood, sweat, and tears into the pockmarked and cratered earth of Afghanistan. The mountains, valleys, and plains of that broken nation have become an increasingly hostile proving ground for America’s counterinsurgency policy. The cities have always been, and continue to be, in a state of dangerous anarchy.

Afghanistan, on its worst day, is still not as bad as Iraq has been and could be again. However, the problems for American forces in Afghanistan are likely getting worse before they get better.

We are dedicating more and more troops into a country dominated by tribal warlords, drug money, and ancient clan-based rivalries. We are doubling our troop presence in a country that has a long history of dragging out empires and proving too costly to be worthwhile.

Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote a column in Newsweek detailing what the never-ending war in Afghanistan means to America.

When Haass was a member of the Bush administration he argued for a small elite military presence to help establish a national police force. After creating a serviceable police force the troops could withdraw. He argued for the creation of a self-governing bureaucracy in Kabul that would be capable of surviving on its own for the time being.

The Bush administration, on the other hand, was not interested in nation building. It allowed a government to be built in Kabul, but it never supported it in any substantive way. Our forces never invested much in building the country back up. We simply hunted for nomadic terrorist groups in the secluded mountains, wasting what would have been the perfect time to lay foundations for what was to come.

In 2010, the Obama administration has been left to make up for 8 years of Bush-era dithering. The Karzai government in Kabul is corrupt and inefficient, but what could we really expect from a democratic body that formed itself out of the ashes of 40 years of conflict.

The Afghan police force is poorly equipped, and even more poorly trained. This is exactly what we should expect from a group trained by mercenaries instead of soldiers. The mercenaries want to be there; training their protégés as poorly as possibly is a guarantee that they will be needed in the future. Our soldiers just want to come home; they would spare no expense in making sure anyone in their care was given all he needed to be an effective force in the field.

President Obama has been left to clean up the mess in Afghanistan, but he is going about it in the wrong way. The Democrats think that they have to make up for every failure of George W. Bush. In reality, they need to adapt to the world created by the failures. Sending more troops will not stop the resurgence of al-Qaeda, nor will it help the government in Kabul grow into an effective assembly. All it will do is put more American soldiers in harms way, and put more of our dwindling reserves of money on the line.

As Haass says, when given the chance to reassess Afghanistan, the Obama administration has continually chosen to escalate.

The troop surge in Iraq did nothing to solve the problems of terrorism, violence and instability. When we sent in more troops we killed more terrorists, but we also lost more of our own in the process, and helped to create more anti-American animosity than ever before. There is no reason to think that an Afghan troop surge will have different results.

The White House has many options on the table. We could draw back our troop presence, and increase the aid that we give the Afghan people. For obvious reasons a grateful nation is less likely to harbor animosity and look to harm what troops remain.

We could draw back our presence and help build a decentralized federal authority in Afghanistan. A strong central bureaucracy has never governed the Afghan people, but it would be possible to set up something on a local level.

The United States could do virtually anything in Afghanistan, yet we continue this listless ideal of troop surge and hope. If this country is ever going to leave Afghanistan with some semblance of stability it will need more than hoping for the best.

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