The Latest from Kandahar

The Washington Post’s excellent Rajiv Chandrasekaran reports on the U.S. efforts to replicate the security systems that worked in Baghdad. My conclusion: it will probably take a very long time to know if this is going to work–and, in the end, it probably won’t. The difference between Baghdad and Kandahar is that in Baghdad Iraqi police worked shoulder-to-shoulder with U.S. troops in neighborhood police stations. In Kandahar, as Chandrasekaran reports, there is a profound absence of competent Afghans willing to work for the government. The efforts of the U.S. military are, again, heroic. But we’re not in Baghdad anymore.