General John Allen, the top U.S. and allied commander in Afghanistan, checks out the local handmade goods for sale outside his headquarters in Kabul last Saturday
It’s getting tougher to find good news from Afghanistan these days. “Good news has a hard time making it to the headlines these days, but the fact is there is good news,” Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Monday about the dearth of positive pieces emanating from the country. Battleland would like to help, Mr. Secretary, but the latest from Time contributor Karen Leigh, recently posted on Foreignpolicy.com, is bluntly headlined Afghanistan Falls Apart:
Recent American missteps have rocked Afghan officials’ faith in the coalition’s ability to help govern the country’s tenuous political situation. “The Afghans have to be wondering how incompetent we are,” adds a former civilian advisor to ISAF in Afghanistan. “[Afghan parliamentarians] have to be very, very frustrated because we’ve undercut their ability to work with us. How do you now go about selling working with the Americans to people on the street?” There is a pervasive fear on the streets of Kabul that, once coalition forces leave, the traditional hard-line nationalists — known, during the Taliban’s era in power, for gruesome torture and punishment — will reemerge in full force.