Word: afghanistan
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...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...
...Obama Administration has stressed that its Afghan plan can't work unless Pakistan shuts down Taliban safe havens on its side of the border. But Pakistan has declined to do so, because its key decision makers - the military leadership - don't share the U.S. view of the conflict in Afghanistan. Months of cajoling and exhortation by U.S. officials have failed to shake the Pakistani view that the country's prime security challenge is its lifelong conflict with India rather than the threat of Taliban extremism, and the Pakistani military sees the Karzai government as being under Indian sway...
...While U.S. officials decry the distinction between the Afghan and Pakistani Talibans, Pakistan's generals believe that their domestic Taliban insurgency will stop only once the Americans have left Afghanistan. But they want the U.S. to leave in an orderly fashion, on the basis of a political settlement: a deal negotiated with the Taliban that sees the Karzai government replaced or remade in a new arrangement that gives Pakistan-aligned Pashtuns far greater power...