"Is Afghanistan Really The Right War?"

Thu Oct 1, 2:49 PM  The casket of corporal Jonathan Couturier is carried into the church before his funeral in Shannon, October 1, 2009. Couturier died when an improvised explosive device detonated near his armoured vehicle, southwest of Kandahar City Afghanistan on September 17, 2009.REUTERS/Mathieu Belanger (CANADA MILITARY OBITUARY)

President Barack Obama is confronting a split among his closest advisers on Afghanistan, reflecting divisions in his own party over whether to send in thousands more U.S. troops and complicating his efforts to adopt a war policy he can sell to a public grown weary of the 8-year-old conflict.

With top military commanders and congressional Republicans pushing for a troop increase, Obama pressed key members of his national security team Wednesday for their views during an intense, three-hour session in a packed White House Situation Room.

The talks revealed the emerging fault lines within the administration, with military commanders solidly behind the request for additional troops and other key officials divided.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and special Afghan and Pakistan envoy Richard Holbrooke appeared to be leaning toward supporting a troop increase, the official said.

White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and Gen. James Jones, Obama's national security adviser, appeared to be less supportive, the official said. Vice President Joe Biden, who attended the meeting, has been reluctant to support a troop increase, favoring a strategy that directly targets al-Qaida fighters who are believed to be hiding in Pakistan.

The meeting, the second of at least five Obama has planned as he reviews his Afghanistan strategy, comes after a critical assessment of the war effort from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the man he put in charge of the war earlier this year. McChrystal declared that the U.S. would fail to meet its objective of causing irreparable damage to Taliban militants and their al-Qaida allies if the administration did not significantly increase American forces. (Read Full Article)

During the presidential election campaign, Barack Obama maintained that Iraq was the wrong war for the US and Afghanistan was the right one.

Now he seems to be having second thoughts. But in one of the most stark warnings a field commander has ever delivered to his president, Gen. Stanley McChrystal has declared that, without a rapid infusion of more troops, the war will "likely result in failure." He is surely frustrated with White House ponderings about whether the US has the "right strategy" in Afghanistan.

Well, the strategy is pretty clear. It is to make Afghans secure enough to reject the Taliban and their Al Qaeda mentors.

Although Afghanistan itself concerns US security, the prospect of events there destabilizing neighboring Pakistan is a nightmare. Theoretically an ally of America, Pakistan is suspicious and often mistrustful of Washington. It believes the US has been hot and cold on the relationship, depending on American needs and ambitions at given times. It worries about US ties with India, with which the Pakistanis have oft been embattled.

Moreover, although the Pakistan Army has recently stepped up its campaign against extremists, the influential Pakistani intelligence service has long maintained political and operational ties with the Taliban and tribes living in, and moving across, the ill-defined "Af-Pak" border.

A Taliban takeover of Afghanistan would provide a major haven for Taliban and Al Qaeda to attempt destabilization of Pakistan. Pakistan's own political situation has see-sawed over the years between fragile democracy and authoritarian rule. Pakistan also has nuclear weapons.

We know that Al Qaeda has had an interest in acquiring a nuclear bomb. Transfer of such a weapon to a terrorist organization with the intent of exploding it in Israel or the US is something the US cannot permit.  (Read Full Article)

Neoconservatism was founded in the 1960s and '70s when Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and other Democrats came to view their party – with its demands for an expanding welfare state and a less militaristic approach to the USSR – as a bastion of naive and destructive policies. They were liberals who despised hippies.

They associated themselves with the perceived more muscular liberalism of the first half of the 20th century, especially concerning foreign policy. In a 1995 Foreign Affairs piece, John Judis writes that neocons "were Cold War liberals who searched for a Truman in the 1970s and found Reagan."

The neocons' shift rightward initially brought them to the offices of Henry "Scoop" Jackson, the Washington senator and Democratic hawk on Vietnam. Later, many flocked to the Reagan administration. George W. Bush didn't campaign as a neocon, but his staff was dominated by neocon thinkers. After 9/11, neoconservatism was virtually synonymous with Republican foreign policy.

Across those decades, neoconservatives have supported myriad, sometimes contradictory policies. For this reason, Mr. Kristol describes his creed as neither a social movement nor full-bodied ideology, but rather a "persuasion." Still, there exist core neocon values, all of which relate to a notion of imperialistic democracy.

Obama opposes them all.

All modern US presidents speak about the spread of democracy, but politics is about priorities. And Obama has focused more on international stability and economic development. For instance, he recognized the legitimacy of Iranian leadership after an illegitimate election because he wanted to maintain a stable negotiating partner. And his support for Afghan and Iraqi democracy is best understood in the context of searching for long-term stability in those nations; he never mentions spreading democracy in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Obama has five gigantic fires to put out – Iraq, Afghanistan-Pakistan, Iran, Islamic radicalism, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – all of which threaten global stability. Unlike the neocons, he doesn't unite his solutions to these challenges into a grand strategy to save mankind. The flexibility this affords is a good thing. Whether any of his policies will ultimately work is another question. (Read Full Article)

    Is Afghanistan really the right war? Neocons definitely would say that it is, along with Iraq and any other nation America can pick a fight with. Neocons love war. The question is whether President Obama is really "a wolf in sheep's clothing", a neocon under the cover of soft diplomacy? Wars are nothing to trifle with. Either you fight the war with overwhelming force or not fight at all. America has and is  fighting two wars in a half ass manner for too long. With so many pressing domestic issues, America can no longer afford to imperiously maintain stability in the Middle East or any where else. Al-queda may get hold of some nukes but that's what we spend billions on Homeland Security for. As I see it, no longer is Afghanistan or any other war, "the right war". Bring our troops home!

tags: war on terror  afghanistan  war  warpeace  politics  middleeast  takebackamerica  

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