US Pursues a New Way To Rebuild in Afghanistan - Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Washington Post.
.. Members of his (President Obama) national security team have concluded that the country requires not just more money and personnel for reconstruction but also a fundamental overhaul of the US approach to development. They want to implement broad-based initiatives aimed at improving the lives of as many Afghans as possible, shifting away from an approach employed during the Bush presidency that focused on generating discrete "success stories" and creating long-term economic sustainability through free-market reform.
Bush administration officials contend that their method was necessary to win financial support from Congress, and to build a degree of self-sufficiency that the country desperately needs, but Obama's advisers maintain it resulted in few tangible improvements for most Afghans, leading many of them to shift allegiance to the Taliban.
The consequences of the Bush approach have been most evident in US efforts to help resuscitate Afghanistan's agricultural economy, which has been severely degraded by years of war, according to internal government documents and interviews with dozens of officials involved in the country's reconstruction. Instead of emphasizing programs to help meet domestic food needs by increasing farm yields, US aid officials focused much of their resources on countering the growth of opium-producing poppies through projects that encouraged other ways to make a living in rural areas. The projects often had little to do with agriculture and did not address the root causes of why farmers became part of the drug trade...
More at The Washington Post.
In Afghanistan, Halting Civilian Deaths in Strikes is a Tough Mission - David Zucchino, Los Angeles Times.
The mounting death toll of Afghan civilians from US airstrikes has unleashed a tide of resentment and fury that threatens to undermine the American counterinsurgency effort. From President Obama to the new US commander in Afghanistan, Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, American officials have made the reduction of civilian deaths a top priority as they revamp their strategy.
McChrystal, who took command this week, told Congress that the measure of success in Afghanistan should be the number of civilians protected, not the number of insurgents killed. Reducing civilian casualties is "essential to our credibility," he said.
The US military employs a lengthy set of precautions, including written rules of engagement and multiple levels of approval before bombs can be dropped or missiles launched.
To gauge each mission's risk to civilians, a collateral damage estimate, or CDE, is prepared.
Yet civilian deaths continue to mount. US commanders have not specified how they intend to reduce them, except to continue rigorously reviewing and enforcing existing restrictions. But the nature of the war almost guarantees more accidental deaths.
More at The Los Angeles Times.