Word: warring
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Brothers was the weekend's prestige item: a family drama starring Spider-Man (Tobey Maguire), a Star Wars princess (Natalie Portman) and the surviving dude from Brokeback Mountain (Jake Gyllenhaal). Big stars when they're in big movies, the trio will have a tougher time selling this honorable tale of war and woe; Brothers finished third with $9.7 million. Three slots further down, the heist film Armored swiped $6.6 million, or less than a sixth of the amount the guys in the movie are stealing. That's pretty feeble for the week's only new action film, whose low-wattage...
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 of the war...
...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...
...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 wrote last week, "The U.S. counter-insurgency plan assumes that Pashtun villagers dislike and fear the Taliban, and just need to be protected from them so as to stop the politics of intimidation. But what if the villagers...
...numbers show the extent of the war on education by the Pakistani Taliban. At least 473 schools across Swat and Federally Administered Tribal Areas have been destroyed over the past two years. Militants recently blew up a 12-room state-run high school and health clinic for boys in Hangu district, a small area nestled on the border of North Waziristan and the North-West Frontier Province. And they routinely blow up girls' schools in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and North-West Frontier Province. Three have been destroyed in the past two weeks. (See pictures of suicide-bomb attacks...