Remember This War?

Abdul Salaam Rocketi, a former frontline Mujahedin commander in Afghanistan, earned a surname that reflects his prowess with rocket-propelled grenades and spent eight months in detention after U.S.-led forces drove out the Taliban in 2001. Now, as a member of the Afghan parliament, he encourages his former Taliban comrades to reconcile with the government of President Hamid Karzai. But he can't visit his constituency in the southern district of Zabul because security is terrible and he's received too many assassination threats. Rocketi is grateful for foreign aid, but frustrated that donors regularly cough up so much less than promised that the country's development can't really take off. "We live like beggars," he says.

It's widely agreed that Afghanistan's national army and police, despite some improvements, are far too small and weak to take on powerful narco-traffickers, local warlords and increasingly audacious[an error occurred while processing this directive] Taliban forces; nevertheless, Rocketi despairs at Karzai's recent proposal to recruit tribal militias to become a sort of police auxiliary, which he figures will just encourage them to greater lawlessness and corruption. "These militias destroyed our country," he says, referring to the devastating civil war that shattered Afghanistan following the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. "The nation was fed up with them, so the Afghan people welcomed the Taliban. And now the government wants to bring them back? This is madness."

Now the greatest military alliance in the world is hoping to transform Afghanistan's madness into some sort of normality. NATO now has 21,000 troops in its International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) — up from 9,000 in June — and will be adding thousands more by the end of the year, when it takes charge of security in the country's eastern sector. The reinforcements are coming primarily from the U.S., Canada, Britain and the Netherlands, though 33 other countries also contribute to isaf. (Around 10,000 troops under direct U.S. control will continue to hunt Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders in the wild reaches straddling the border with Pakistan, where the Taliban maintains bases.) There's a consensus among European political élites that Afghanistan isn't an Iraq; even left-wing governments believe the war there is legal and worth fighting to keep the country from reverting to a safe harbor for the Taliban and al-Qaeda. But amid new demands for peacekeepers in south Lebanon and a worsening situation in Afghanistan — at least 14 Canadian and British soldiers have been killed and dozens more wounded since the beginning of August — NATO countries are unlikely to make further commitments of troops and money, even if that's required to turn Afghanistan around.