ASOP is just the latest in a long line of attempts to create community councils, or community development councils, or shuras, or jirgas, or any similarly-focused program that has been foisted on villages and then underfunded since 2002. It is the latest in a long line of programs meant to establish the district councils mandated by Article 140 of the Afghan Constitution but never implemented.

Gopal isn't doing “great reporting” by talking about it in a vacuum, he is doing it a disservice, since it is structured almost the exact same as the National Solidarity Programme, only it happens to have funding right now.

The only difference between these programs is that they are created under different, parallel initiatives funded by different (mostly European) countries. They look almost all alike because they're the same idea, just executed without coordination — a far bigger problem, as that gets at accountability, which brings us to Sarah Chayes.

As a longtime resident of Kandahar, Ms. Chayes experiences in person — she goes to great lengths, and has for years, to demonstrate this — the corruption that occupies most people's attention EVEN MORE THAN THE TALIBAN. In fact, she explicitly makes the argument that official corruption drives people to support the insurgency — which is matched by other embedded reporting when journalists bother to get outside the FOB and report on regular, non-military Afghans. In fact, corruption is at the heart for why Hamid Karzai is the exact wrong person to deserve American support in the upcoming election — because if he wins, nothing will change, and democracy entrenching unpopular corruption is about the worst thing for Afghanistan right now.

So yes, she is talking about out-governing the Taliban. Removing the incentives for supporting the insurgency. Fixing the political reasons behind our failure. Whatever you want to call it, that is what she is talking about. It is far more fundamental than the little-t problem, because without fixing corruption there is nothing to draw the little-t Taliban to.

Which is why I get cranky at all this platitudinous flimflammery masquerading as analysis.