Word: afghanization
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...Mystery of the Surge" [Nov. 23]: President Obama stated unequivocally that victory over the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan is essential to U.S. national security. If this is true, why agonize over the corruption of Hamid Karzai's regime or the ability to effectively train the Afghan police and military? We must defend our national-security interests, whatever it takes. And if it takes more troops, so be it. On the other hand, if the mission is judged impossible, Obama has a sacred responsibility to get the troops out of that rat hole and devise a containment strategy...
President Obama conducted his ninth war council on Afghanistan shortly before Thanksgiving with a fresh face at the table: Peter Orszag, head of the Office of Management and Budget. The appearance of Obama's chief bookkeeper at what's likely to be the final Afghan war-cabinet meeting signals growing concern over the cost of a new war plan expected to include sending some 30,000 more troops into the fight...
...With the Afghan war now into its ninth year, Obama is facing increasing pressure from Congress to justify its cost. Members of his own party are talking of a war tax, underscoring their opposition to reinforcing the 68,000 U.S. troops now there. "If this war is important enough to expand and fight, then it ought to be important enough to pay for," says Wisconsin Representative David Obey, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee...
...Pakistan Shares the U.S.'s Goals The 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...
...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...