Cables reveal US officials' sense of futility in Afghanistan

Leaked U.S. diplomatic cables covering recent years of Afghanistan policy portray an unremittingly bleak landscape in which U.S. officials have alternately cajoled and pressured an erratic Afghan president, been repeatedly exasperated by corruption and seemed destined to repeat the past.

"What does it take to break out of the cycle of 'clear and clear again' to achieve sustained success in an area of persistent insurgency?" U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry lamented in a June 2009 cable to Washington about repeated coalition offensives followed by Taliban resurgence in an area north of Kabul. The document was among dozens released to news organizations by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.

"No matter how effective military performance may be, the insurgents will readily fill any vacuums of governance, and without political competence, lasting [counterinsurgency] success . . . will remain one more operation away," Eikenberry concluded in an assessment that echoes concerns expressed over the current coalition offensive in the southern province of Kandahar.

Last spring, when Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates visited a town in Helmand province, site of a major Marine offensive this year, aides noted that his walk through the marketplace and chats with local residents would have been "unthinkable" barely six months earlier. In November 2008, U.S. Embassy officials reported a similar walk, in a nearby town, by then-British Foreign Secretary David Miliband.

"A large number of local elders turned out," the report noted, and Miliband "bought locally produced pomegranates .. . . None of this would have been possible only a few months ago."