Word: afghanistan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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President Obama knows that the Afghan war is going badly, but he insists that the specter of an al-Qaeda comeback makes Afghanistan a "war of necessity." So he has ordered some 30,000 new troops to the front, hoping to hold the line enough that Afghan forces can be built up to eventually take over the mission from the U.S. It may sound like a limited goal, after the sweeping visions of democracy promised during the Bush years. But even that relatively modest strategy is based on some very questionable assumptions. (See a slide show...
...Qaeda Threat Requires a Ground War Obama made the threat of al-Qaeda's returning on the back of a Taliban victory the primary rationale for escalating the war in Afghanistan. But as many have pointed out, al-Qaeda doesn't need sanctuaries in order to plot terrorist attacks, and its leadership core is based in the neighboring tribal areas of Pakistan - which means that 100,000 U.S. troops are now being committed to a mission whose goal is to prevent a few hundred men from re-establishing a base of operations...
...then there's the problem that having masses of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, for whatever reason, inevitably creates a nationalist backlash that fuels the insurgency - a problem that Defense Secretary Robert Gates had noted early in the debate. The fact that the Taliban is now effectively in control of as much as half of the country eight years after being routed by the U.S.-led invasion is a sign that the local population is at least more tolerant of an insurgency against foreign forces. Expanding the ground war may not solve this problem. As University of Michigan historian Juan Cole...
...Afghan Security Forces Can Be Trained to Take Over the Mission The centerpiece of Obama's exit strategy is the training of Afghan security forces to take responsibility for fighting the Taliban, just as Iraqi forces have taken charge of security in Iraq. But Afghanistan is nothing like Iraq, and training may not be the decisive issue: although the U.S. has officially trained 94,000 Afghan soldiers, there's no sign of an effective Afghan security force capable of fighting the Taliban. Desertion rates are high - 1 in 4 soldiers trained last year, by some accounts...
...some egregious cases of corruption, his instinct will be to continue to use the power of patronage to broker local support. Corruption and nepotism may be just as much as a symptom of the weakness of the central government as its cause. Even in the times of greatest stability, Afghanistan has been governed from the center via a loose consensus among powerful regional and ethnic leaderships. Karzai might, in fact, have been governing the way a leader without a major national political base of his own deems it necessary to survive in a post-U.S. Afghanistan. And putting...