Word: afghanistans
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...last week, when Obama's Afghanistan point man Richard Holbrooke and his team laid out the Administration's aims for Afghanistan during a briefing at Washington's Center for American Progress, it was clear that the agenda had grown more ambitious. There was talk of creating jobs, growing agribusiness, reforming the justice sector, promoting mobile banking, starting a media commission, fighting corruption. Holbrooke never actually used the phrase, but his program sounded suspiciously like nation-building...
...many Afghanistan experts, that's as it should be. U.S. security goals in the region, they argue, cannot be achieved purely by military means; good governance and modern institutions are essential to prevent the resurgence of extremism and to allow American and NATO troops to someday head home. "Democracy and development have to be part of any exit strategy," says the Rand Corp.'s James Dobbins, who was President Bush's first envoy to Kabul. (Read "Afghanistan Exit Strategy: Buying Off the Taliban...
...Obama Administration has indeed signed up for nation-building in Afghanistan, it hasn't told the American electorate - an omission that could bring political grief at home and strategic costs in Afghanistan. In his comments on Afghanistan to date, Obama has "never owned up to state-building, never said so," says Ashley Tellis, an Afghanistan expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "He's committed to doing something that the country has not been brought along...
...Administration already bogged down in a health-care debate and with its hands full of domestic economic problems persuade Americans that nation-building in Afghanistan is the right thing to do? Tellis believes Obama needs to make the case that U.S. security necessitates it. "Ultimately, it's not about Afghanistan for its own sake, but as an instrument to defeat al-Qaeda, and defend the [American] homeland," he says...
...Afghanistan experts suggest that Obama needs to make that argument now, while Congress is still being patient with the Administration's AfPak policy. "We're going to need time in Afghanistan to be successful," says California Representative Buck McKeon, the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee. Just back from a trip to Afghanistan, McKeon says his main worry is that Obama will come under pressure from his own party to speed things up: "I hope he doesn't get so much push back on the left that he waffles on giving the sufficient time to the military...