Don’t miss this beautiful slideshow of Afghanistan on The Atlantic‘s website, based off of Sarah Chayes’s feature story on “How the author helped Afghans build a thriving soap and body-oil business—and overcame the incompetence of America’s aid establishment” in the current issue.

Rep. Ike Skelton’s office sent me this smart statement on Afghanistan the other day:

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told the House Armed Services Committee today that ‘In Afghanistan, we do what we can; in Iraq, we do what we must.’

This striking statement highlights the strain Iraq is placing on our force and how this affects our ability to achieve strategic victory in Afghanistan, the primary front of the fight against Islamic extremism. I find it troubling that our ongoing commitment in Iraq prevents us from dedicating resources in Afghanistan beyond what is necessary to prevent setbacks, as opposed to what is required to realize success.

I have often said that Afghanistan seems like the forgotten war. I was assured by our witnesses today that the war in Afghanistan isn’t forgotten, but it’s clear that the stress on our military elsewhere has limited our ability to succeed in Afghanistan and has taken our attention away from this critical operation.

All true. The Iraq debate often proceeds as if Iraq just exists in a universe all its own, hermetically sealed off from events inside the United States and around the world. Thus, while the specific structure of the Iraq debate whirls this way and that with the course of events, the basic thrust is that we always need to try one more thing or just wait a few more months and hope something better’s around the corner. In the real world, though, this endless patience with Iraq has real costs. I liked Matt Stoller’s observation that there’s something odd about this: “After going over thirty pages of polling data at Polling Report on Iraq, I noticed that the lines of questioning are mostly organized around military tactics and strategy – are we winning, should we pull out troops, is Bush doing a good job.

As a counterpoint to the woes of Congo, Drake Bennett (via Jim Henley) says much of Africa is doing better than it has in decades. And it’s not just a resource-driven boom: “plenty of Sub-Saharan African countries that don’t boast oil or mineral wealth are also growing, the new World Bank numbers show, and they’re doing it either by finding better ways to make money from traditional exports or by expanding into new sectors.”

One important point in this is that the waning of Cold War tensions open up more space in which good things might happen. Bennett observes that “during the Cold War, African leaders were able to play the United States and Soviet Union off each other, threatening to switch their allegiance if they were pushed too hard to reform.” It’s worse than that, though. During the Cold War, even if you had a good regime in place somewhere, anyone who happened to feel like getting financial and logistical support for his rebellion would only need to turn to the rival superpower. In general, the removal of Cold War tensions seems to have reduced armed conflict all around the world. Clearly, that doesn’t cure problems all on its own, but it creates circumstances in which sound political leadership has a chance to survive, and in which individuals have a little more insulation from political events.

All of which is, to me, one more on the longish list of reasons why it’s important not to let China’s growing prosperity turn into a new superpower rivalry as, for example, Fred Thompson seemed to want to do at yesterday’s debate.

Andrew links to this map, observing it’s “one reason we’re not leaving Iraq.” Ezra remarks that it “helps explain, for one thing, why the Middle East always dominates the foreign policy agenda.” It is, however, worth being precise about this. One dove’s “it’s all about the oil” complaint is another hawk’s “we need to keep invading these countries because our economy depends on it.”

One observation is that the high concentration of oil in the Middle East makes the region unusually war-prone. Brazilians wouldn’t really gain very much from having their government conquer Surinam. But Saddam Hussein or any other Iraqi dictator stood to gain a lot from controlling the Gulf States like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE where the population is low but the oil wealth is high. Meanwhile, a country like Iraq or Iran that has a sizable population plus a ton of oil is in a position to build a pretty large military establishment. Hence the Gulf War-era worry that if Saddam was allowed to conquer Kuwait, he’d move on into Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf, thus putting together a country with truly enormous oil revenues and an enormous amount of market power. That’s why we stepped in as leaders of an international coalition aimed at rolling back his conquest.

At the end of the day, though, helping small countries resist conquest by larger countries is a perfectly sound principle to uphold. It’s true that we might well not have been so eager to save Kuwait had it not had the oil, but it’s also unlikely that anyone would have wanted to conquer Kuwait had it not had the oil. Meanwhile, it’s one thing to help small countries avoid conquest and thus try to prevent someone like Saddam from gaining hegemony over the whole region. It’s another thing to say that we should start conquering countries in order to establish our own hegemony.

The New York Times reports that the situation in Congo, which had been looking tentatively more stable for a few years, is heading back down the drain as a result of conflict between the central government and forces loyal to Laurent Nkunda. Looking for background, I went to the International Crisis Group’s website, where there most recent Congo report was this from October recommending, among other things, that “[t]he international community should encourage Kabila to suspend his military offensive and launch a comprehensive peace initiative for North Kivu, aimed first at de-escalating the conflict and improving the general security environment in the province, then addressing the core issues related to restoration of state authority such as regulation of the exploitation of natural resources, return of refugees and a transitional justice process facilitating community reconciliation.”

It didn’t happen. Instead, the offensive went forward, and now according to the Times‘s Lydia Polgreen “General Nkunda’s forces routed army troops in towns they had taken just days before and threatened to take Sake as well.” I can’t really add anything to the reporting I read, just think it’s sometimes worth trying to raise the profile of these stories that tend not to get much play in the U.S.