It was a primitive form of surgery. Almost ten years ago, the United States and its allies stuck a knife deep into Afghanistan in an attempt to remove two malignancies, al-Qaeda and the Taliban. One of those, Osama bin Laden’s crew, is nearly gone. The Taliban, after going into remission for a brief period, has come back.
The knife remains in the patient. With bin Laden gone, the debate has intensified: what to do with the knife?
It’s tempting to expect perfection from those we admire, but we romanticize lone heroes at our peril.
Though Abu Zubaydah was rejected by al Qaeda and is mentally ill, he’s been detained at Guantanamo for nine years with no plans to review his case.
The U.S. army doesn’t put some of the dirtiest fighting ever past the Taliban.
I’ve never met President Obama, never been invited to any White House confabs. I’ve never even been able to sit through one of his speeches. But my office is about six blocks away from the White House. So, like any good Washington pundit who imagines that proximity translates into perceptiveness, I feel entirely qualified to look into the president’s eyes to get a sense of his soul. Here’s what I believe President Obama will be thinking as he reads off the teleprompter.
Does anybody really know what counterinsurgency is anymore?
Foreign occupation is the common thread tying suicide terrorism together the world over. In Dying to Win and again in Cutting the Fuse, Robert Pape argues that the United States must endeavor to draw down its occupation of Middle Eastern countries and return to a policy of offshore balancing to maintain its regional interests.
In spite of a White House report that “progress” is being made in Afghanistan, by virtually any measure the war has significantly deteriorated since the Obama administration surged troops into Kandahar and Helmand provinces. This past year has been the deadliest on record for U.S. and coalition troops. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, security has worsened throughout the country. Civilian casualties are on the rise. U.S. allies are falling away, and the central government in Kabul has never been so isolated. Polls in Afghanistan, the United States, and Europe reflect growing opposition to the nine-year conflict.
Just as 2010 ended, the American military’s urge to surge resurfaced in a significant way. It seems that “leaders” in the Obama administration and “senior American military commanders” in Afghanistan were acting as a veritable WikiLeaks machine. They slipped information to New York Times reporters Mark Mazzetti and Dexter Filkins about secret planning to increase pressure in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, possibly on the tinderbox province of Baluchistan, and undoubtedly on the Pakistani government and military via cross-border raids by U.S. Special Operations forces in the new year.
In recent memory, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan have received the lion’s share of the attention of U.S. policy in Central Asia. This is not surprising. It would be hard to ignore two wars and the issue of preventing nuclear proliferation either by Iran or from an unstable Pakistan. Yet, U.S. foreign policy has omitted a region that has sparked conflict between two nuclear armed states as recently as 1999. That region is Kashmir.