Nearly four years after the US invaded Afghanistan and ousted the ruling Taleban from power, the US commander of operations there has discovered that the young men who constitute the bulk of Taleban and al Qaeda recruits in that country are less likely to take up arms if they are employed.

The U.S. military operational commander in Afghanistan, Maj. Gen. Jason Kamiya, believes that the more Afghans being put to work helps take away some of the enemies’ ability to recruit.

“I’d rather have an Afghan national working on a road or helping build a clinic than getting three to five bucks or whatever the Taliban or al-Qaida-associated movement pays him to plant an IED (improvised explosive device),” he told The Associated Press on Saturday.

“We are hiring as many Afghans as we can.”

Isn’t that touching? Somehow, our most senior leader in that battered country has arrived at the same formulation as every generation of parents in recorded history.

Better late than never, one supposes, but how could it possibly have taken anyone, least of all the people in charge of securing and rebuilding that country, four years to realize that young men with no money, no prospects and nothing to do are more likely to cause trouble than ones with jobs and some measure of hope?

The oversight is particularly poignant in light of our experience in Iraq, where the commanders charged with securing the country immediately after the invasion were given tens of millions of dollars in cash to fund local construction projects that kept fighting-aged boys and men busy and relatively prosperous until the money ran out and wasn’t renewed, at which point the insurgency began picking up steam.

The textbook example of this — and if it isn’t already in military texts, it will be soon — is the experience of General David Petreaus, who captured Mosul and, until his money ran out, kept it and the surrounding Nineveh province one of the more calm areas of the country. Money wasn’t the only factor in his success; he is in fact dedicated to the proposition of nation-building and used a lot of the experiences he gained in Bosnia to turn the 101 Airborne into a transformational force and not just an occupying one.

But when the money ran out, Mosul blew up. And Petreaus moved on: he’s now charged with the thankless and possibly hopeless task of turning Iraq’s armed forces into a coherent and functional whole.

Honestly: How? How in the world could it take anyone trying to keep a country together four years to figure out what every schoolchild, parent, babysitter, cop and social worker knows? Presumably at some point in time everyone in the Bush administration and the military has filled at least one of those roles.

Maybe Kamiya has been jumping up and down and screaming for money to do this sort of thing since he took command in Afghanistan. Generals are generally pretty smart, even if the Army sometimes assigns them to positions for which their skills aren’t best suited. But to see a statement like that trotted out in apparent earnest punctuates the extent to which our government seems not to understand (there’s that word again) what we’re facing and how to face it. And that’s very, very sad.

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