There is a lengthy McClatchy story about the ongoing “insurgency” in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is a mix of reasonable journalism and unexciting hatchet job. I encourage you to look for yourself.

Western media does a bad job when it comes to defining conflicts. Western government press agents are culpable in this as well, but I suspect this might be partly by design. By and large, the conflict in Afghanistan, and to a lesser degree, Iraq, have ceased to be insurgencies and devolved into complicated civil wars. Because the civil war is waged largely with guerrilla tactics people default to an assumption that we are fighting an insurgency.

This is unhealthy for two reasons: First, labeling the opposition as “insurgents” allows us to underestimate them as a meager handful of hillbillies that we could mop up with one well placed bomb. Second, it lets us think that we are fighting an “insurgency” because that is all the bad guys can muster.

In reality, our opposition in Afghanistan have taken a play from Mao Zedong’s book. The Chinese civil war was largely put on hold to fight Imperial Japan during World War 2. While Mao’s communists would occasionally join Chiang Kai-Chek’s forces to engage the Japanese, they also used the distraction of the superior military forces to snatch the countryside out from under the ruling government’s nose. Once World War 2 concluded, Chiang’s government found itself holed up in isolated urban pockets. All that was left for Mao was to patiently grow his forces while Chiang’s withered.

Westerns have a hard time wrapping their minds about this. In our world, if you control Berlin, Paris or Washington then you’ve got the reigns of Germany, France or the U.S.  Once you get into the wild lands, these rules no longer need apply. What NATO is grappling with is the fact that once you have Kabul, you control, in totality, Kabul. Taking Kabul was the easy part, getting all of Afghanistan to look toward Kabul for guidance would be a historical first.

When the Associated Press publishes things like “Study: Afghanistan Could Fail as a State” I’m left wondering why people pay them as much as they do. Afghanistan as a failed state is about as newsworthy as a sunrise. Draw a time line of Afghan history, pin it on the wall and throw a dart and you’ll either hit failed narco-state or weak theocracy.

An independent study co-chaired by retired Marine Corps Gen. James Jones and former U.N. Ambassador Thomas Pickering offered the usual pile of recommendations, including -

…increase NATO force levels and military equipment sent to Afghanistan, decouple U.S. management of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, establish a special envoy to coordinate all U.S. policy on Afghanistan, and champion a unified strategy among partner nations to stabilize the country in five years.

One of the biggest failings of NATO and NATO countries is the assumption that all countries can be “NATO-fied” with the appropriate leverage of military and economic forces. The fact this approach does not work, like ever, is no impediment to trying it again. Fans of this approach like to point to NAZI Germany or Imperial Japan as evidence, either oblivious or intentionally ignoring that these were traditionally progressive countries that experienced a historically anomalous bit of despotism. Most of our nation-building efforts involve historically despotic countries, and there lies the rub.

Kabul is not Berlin of the 1940s, and pretending we can Marshall Plan it into Jeffersonian democracy is naïve. Finding a strongman to run the country is probably our best shot. Establishing a reasonably pro-western government that will keep the schools open and the extremists away would be worth the effort. Trying to go from theocratic despotism to Federalism in 10 years is not.