This is a little scary. According to General McChrystal, the post-capture plan for Marjah, the Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan, is government in a box. The Guardian editorial page has looked inside the box and is unimpressed:

So what is in the box? Once the fighting has ended, Isaf has dedicated “district development teams” to move into Marjah. A US team is working alongside a group of Afghan civil servants which the Karzai government is allegedly meant to deploy. To encourage them to serve in what must be a highly risky secondment, their average monthly salary is being quintupled to about $300. Once all this is done, the plan is for the US Agency for International Development to help farmers plant crops by opening up the canal network, a project started by the US half a century ago, but which it has yet to complete. As if that were not enough, Hanif Atmar, the Afghan interior minister, urged elders from Marjah’s main tribes to give him their sons so that he can recruit 1,000 local police officers, whose job will be to keep the Taliban out.

I can see why the editors at The Guardian are skeptical. I am as well. So is Joshua Foust – a real Afghanistan expert – at Registan.net:

Which brings us back to the discussion about civilian casualties above. Considering how ISAF was embarrassingly unable to figure out why or how it was going to handle the civilians in Marjeh, right up to their inability to postbelievable or consistent population estimates, I’m left with the same thought I had two weeks ago, when ISAF signaled they were really serious about Marjeh this time: what’s the end game? Simply throwing an expatriate Helmandi who lived in Germany for 15 years into the mix – which is the current plan – doesn’t actually address the serious shortcomings the military-led governance issues have had.

Meanwhile, the civilians continue to bear the brunt of this offensive: the Coalition is destroying the barely functioning Taliban “shadow” government in the area, and so far their plan for a viable replacement haven’t moved beyond the vaguest of platitudes. Please, I am begging the readers here: if you know of some plan to leave something functioning in ISAF’s wake, something Afghan-led with a realistic chance of lasting once the 10,000 (or whatever) troops have to leave this tiny area, please let me know about it. Because right now it looks like they’re fighting with no end game in mind. And that’s pretty scary.

I guess there’s always luck…