Seth Jones Gets Slapped Around
Joshua Foust. Nice.
My biggest problem with Seth Jones isn’t his Big Ideas about Afghanistan (which are mostly inarguable), but that he blithely repeats vague platitudes with no indication about how to implement them. He did this when he was defending Hamid Karzai, and he did that when he timelined the post-2001 war. Now he’s in the WSJ, saying all we need are arbakai and local governance councils. And yes we do—if we reform the constitution, isolate Kabul, completely rework the entire government’s approach to nation-building, and accept all that local corruption he so strongly condemned in his book. And if we somehow make arbakai agents of security instead of insecurity, which is unlikely outside of Loya Paktiya. But he wrote a book, so listen to him! [Update: Christian Bleuer notices something I forgot in all my annoyance: Jones doesn’t even understand the field he’s writing off with a single sentence. And he’s the RAND expert!]
-Shlok
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