The Polish daily Gazeta (via Nicolas Gros-Verheyde) is reporting that Poland is planning to send 400 more troops to Afghanistan. That might seem like good news for an Obama administration that has been lowering its expectations for European troop increases. (And yes, any good news on European troop increases will number in the hundreds, not the thousands.) But the reason why the Poles are likely to send the reinforcements is cause for some concern: The 1,600 Polish troops in Ghazni province are in for an exceptionallystormy spring and summer. U.S. forces will be pushing the Taliban out ofthe Kabul region [...]
I’ve said this before, but the militarization of the Afghan economy doesn’t strike me as an effective way to pacify the place. This picture by Josh Foust (more here) of FOB Salerno in Khost Province, Afghanistan, got me thinking that essentially what we’re modelling in Iraq (the Green Zone) and Afghanistan is the most extreme version of the American gated community. But when a gated community is inhabited primarily by soldiers (yes, I’m exagerrating to make the point), it becomes a garrison. Apparently that’s what’s left of the nation-building approach.
This is just a re-occuring, random thought that’s been bouncing around in my head for the past few weeks, but I thought I’d air it out: Is there something peculiar to the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars that explains why the literature to emerge from them is almost exclusively non-fiction, whether war memoirs or war reporting? Or does that just reflect on the current state of the publishing industry? My hunch is that it’s both. Or to be more specific, it’s a reflection of the professionalization of the military. To be sure, there were plenty of war memoirs to come out [...]
