Matthew T Grant

Obama is upping the troop levels, as everyone has heard. He’s also added a timeline: draw down to start in July 2011.

Conservatives applaud the increase but deride the deadline. Their argument that it will give “our enemies” a chance to lay low and wait us out rings hollow to me for no other reason than that, if we and our allies are able to improve security and support much needed development work over the next couple years, this will actually be worse for said enemies than a prolonged, virtually endless armed struggle.

At the same time, I can’t help but think of the words of Rory Stewart who says that, development-wise, Afghanistan is “20 years behind Pakistan and India is a distant dream.” He advocates a decades-long commitment with a relatively small military footprint (around 20,000 troops) and an intense focus on humanitarian projects to build local infrastructure.

Given that, I’m less concerned about how long we’re going to have boots on the ground and more concerned about how much time we’re willing to invest in modernizing one of the poorest nations on Earth (and not just because we want to control the global heroin trade).