Civilian goals largely unmet in Afghanistan

Even as President Obama leads an intense debate over whether to send more troops to Afghanistan, administration officials say the United States is falling far short of his goals to fight the country's endemic corruption, create a functioning government and legal system and train a police force currently riddled with incompetence. Interviews with senior administration and military officials and recent reports assessing Afghanistan's progress show that nearly seven months after Obama announced a stepped-up civilian effort to bolster his deployment of 17,000 additional American troops, many civil institutions are deteriorating as much as the country's security. Afghanistan is now so dangerous, administration officials said, that many aid workers cannot travel outside the capital, Kabul, to advise farmers on crops, a key part of Obama's announcement in March that he was deploying hundreds of additional civilians to work in the country. The judiciary is so weak that Afghans increasingly turn to a shadow Taliban court system because, a senior military official said, "a lot of the rural people see the Taliban justice as at least something."