Quite simply, the Taliban does not have the luxury of “waiting us out” for 18 months. If they survive that long then it is because we failed in our ground-level counterinsurgency policy, not because we telegraphed our intention not to stay indefinitely. And if they do try and lay low and wait us out, the Afghan army and government will have had that much more time to establish its legitimate control over the entirety of southern Afghanistan.

Duss adds:

If killing the enemy were the main goal, then their decision to hunker down and wait for the U.S. to begin leaving might be a problem. But as the main goal of the new COIN strategy in Afghanistan is to secure the population, build trust with local communities through effective delivery of services, all the while increasing Afghan capacity to continue doing those things when we leave, it’s really not. The Taliban “waiting us out” would just give the U.S. more time and space to make Afghanistan a more inhospitable place for the Taliban.

While I agree with both Elrod and Matt that the criticisms of a timeline for withdrawal are often misguided, their comeback has its own set of problems.

It’s true that while the COIN strategy is population-centric rather than enemy-centric, this strategy is still too focused on a nation-state as a self-contained territory.  The assumption being that if you get villagers on your side with better services and then train an army & police force to guard the country as we begin to leave, the Taliban will not find any willing hosts.

Of course, the Afghan Taliban themselves have a head start and have been perfecting their own form of population-centric (i.e. tribal or village-centric) insurgency these past few years.

To counter that trend, the US wants to initiate its own form of population-centric warfare.  This would entail a village by village strategy, but what is the relationship between the village-centric counter-insurgency and training a national army and police force?  Taking a population-centric strategy would lead to empowering local leaders to form tribal-based security outfits, but this will undoubtedly come at the expense of the national government’s influence, which to begin with doesn’t have much effective control outside of Kabul.  I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing as I’ve never been a fan of the state-building mission in Afghanistan, but there’s a zero-sum trade off between local militias and the country’s national government.

Max Weber defined the nation-state as having a monopoly on the means of legitimate force within its boundaries. At least in Afghanistan, population-centric counter-insurgency undermines that reality.   This is where (I think) Elrod’s response breaks down. The lack of centralized control undermines his last argument about the government (presumably via a national army) establishing “legitimate” sovereign control over the south of the country.  Of course, legitimate sovereign control assumes the modern Weberian nation-state as the prime locus of the country’s political identity.  [Read more →]

Scott quotes the following from Kevin Drum:

There are two possible reasons for the speech being so unconvincing: either Obama doesn’t know how to deliver a good speech or else Obama isn’t really convinced himself.  But we know the former isn’t true, don’t we?  You can fill in the rest yourself.

Scott then adds:

If Kevin is right, and I think there is reason to believe that he is, then Obama, while not operating in the same cold and calculating fashion as a Karl Rove, has failed in his primary charge as Commander-in-Chief and the implications are potentially as disastrous as Rove, Cheney, and Bush’s soulless calculus was.

Channeling Freddie for a second, it is enragingly infuriating that the idea of actually saying, “This is not winnable, we need to find a responsible way of extricating ourselves,” was simply never an honestly considered option. The myopic sense of options and inability to overcome prideful hubris in American foreign policy is, perhaps, the greatest challenge facing the country if it is to really move into a constructive and proactive frame in the twenty-first century.

Kevin’s second proposal needs some expansion.  Let’s assume it is broadly correct as does Scott.  Why would Obama not have his heart into it?

One possible (counter)explanation is that Obama really couldn’t find any decision that he felt was the right one and he thought this decision was the least worst and he couldn’t hide that in his speech.  That would still fulfill Kevin’s theory as to why the speech fell flat without the need to piggyback a theory of politics over-riding true feelings on the war.

Another (possibly related) counter-argument would be that Obama brought forth a policy that he thought was the best compromise–and inherently therefore in part compromised–between the various members of his advisory panel.  We’ve learned that VP Biden signed on because Obama narrowed the focus to al-Qaeda and put more emphasis (arguably) on Pakistan than he did Afghanistan, as well as setting a date in 2011 for withdrawal from Afghanistan.  Secs. Gates and Clinton seem to have signed on because that date was open to some conditionality.  While National Security Adviser Jones seems to have found the ambiguity of the timeline conducive to getting both sides of this debate together.

A third version would go that Obama has (seriously and sincerely) thought the US should be fighting the war in Afghanistan for awhile now.  That accords with everything he’s said for basically the last 6 years.  But simply it’s too late in the game and Obama has realized he can’t fight it in the way he wished and yet at the same time he knows that if he starts extrication now it will be a bloodbath and he doesn’t want that on his hands.

Obama said during the campaign that on foreign policy he aligned with the realist school of George H.W. Bush.  He has been advised by Colin Powell and kept Bob Gates (a Bush I realist) as Sec. Def.  In fact this decision is a kind of mini-Powell Doctrine refracted through the lens of population-centric COIN popular in the military:  go in hard and heavy and then get out.  In some ways the past President Obama appears to be most emulating in foreign policy (so says Peter Beinart in a very sharp piece) is Richard Nixon, the arch-realist with his own version of an escalation-cum prelude to withdraw.

I don’t have a real way of knowing if any of those hypotheses are valid.  I’m just playing Devil’s Advocate for a moment.  But if any (or any combination) were to be correct, then I think they undermine Scott’s comparison to Rove, et. al.

But let’s examine this comparison Scott makes to the previous administration.  [Read more →]

Obama will send 30,000 troops, has a (basic) end-date in sight (approximately three years later according to the piece I linked above), will ramp up training of the Afghan Army and Police, and wants to gradually transition over to an Afghan government.  Though it’s also likely that the US will keep some military advisors as well as air and logistical support in the country longer than that time-frame.  In short, Obama wants to try to achieve some victories against the insurgency in Afghanistan in the short term and then quickly transition the US out of the hot zone.

Unfortunately, things usually don’t turn out so neat and tidy in any war:

“We want to – as quickly as possible – transition the security of the Afghan people over to those national security forces in Afghanistan,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “This can’t be nation-building. It can’t be an open-ended forever commitment.”

Here’s more information on the national army and police:

In Kabul, Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell, the new head of a U.S.-NATO command responsible for training and developing Afghan soldiers and police, said Tuesday that although the groundwork is being laid to expand the Afghan National Army beyond the current target of 134,000 troops, to be reached by Oct. 31, 2010, no fixed higher target is set.

There is a notional goal of eventually fielding 240,000 soldiers and 160,000 police, but Caldwell said that could change.

“Although that is a goal and where we think it could eventually go to, it’s not a hard, firm, fixed number,” he said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.

He indicated that one reason for avoiding a hard-and-fast commitment to those higher numbers is the expected cost. So his orders are to reach the targets of 134,000 soldiers and 96,800 police by next October. He intends to hold annual reviews, beginning next spring or early summer, to determine whether the notional higher targets of 240,000 soldiers and 160,000 police – for a combined total of 400,000 by 2013 – are still the right goals for Afghanistan.

According to counterinsurgency doctrine, there needs to be roughly 500,000 counterinsurgents in Afghanistan. So 240,000 army plus 160,000 police equals 400,000 troops plus the NATO contingent (mostly US) of about 100,000 when this additional surge is factored in.  And there you have 500,000 counterinsurgents.

But counterinsurgents fighting from whom exactly?  Who is going to be there to follow-up with political and economic development after the fighting is over?  That question–the central question with respect to Afghanistan, in my mind–has yet to be persuasively answered.

To make that point clearer, I think a comparison with Iraq is in order.

If this policy is going to be likened to the Iraq surge (and it is certainly based in some measure on that event), then it’s worth reviewing exactly what happened in Iraq.  The surge–i.e. the addition of more troops into Iraq–was only a part of a larger process which could be broadly labeled counterinsurgency.

We need to recall what was going on in Iraq 2005-2007: [Read more →]

The entire piece is framed around whether or not Obama is really taking on his role of Commander in Chief, which needless to say (alright, I’ll say it anyway) is pretty stupid stuff.  It only goes downhill from there.

Here are Feaver’s bullet points (bullet points!), which list signs that Obama really is becoming an honest-to-God Commander in Chief (As opposed to whatever he’s been so far in office? WTF?):

• His follow-through on messaging is sustained and vigorous (and matched by a similar on-message effort by the senior White House staff and cabinet-level officials).
• He reaches out to Republicans, thanking them for their commitment to the war effort and promising to work with them. (If he really wants to show self-confidence, he might even say some kind words about President Bush and his courage as a war-time leader, but it is perhaps unreasonable to expect such a transcendently classy gesture at this stage.)
• He and his team describe the Afghan effort as a war to be won.
• He and his team sketch a vision of “success” in terms of achievable objectives. Any discussion of an “exit strategy” is similarly framed in terms of mission success.
• He and his team describe the American (and allied) troops who are fighting as heroes who are fighting to defend our freedoms against malevolent enemies that really do seek to do us harm.
• He thanks our troops as well as our allies, including our Afghan allies, for the sacrifices they are making and he promises them that on his watch he will do everything necessary to see that those sacrifices will be redeemed by seeing the war through to a successful conclusion.
• He levels with the American people about the costly road ahead, but explains why alternatives would be even costlier

Notice how many of these are built around emotion and rhetoric.

Obama should thank the troops for their sacrifices–and he’s done this on many occasions.  Unfortunately, I think Feaver’s misplaced his right-wing talking points.  I thought the line was to criticize Obama for being photoed while saluting dead soldiers. Obama should also thank Republicans?  What? Why? He should describe our soldiers as “heroes”—um, when does he not do this?

Another neocon classic–defining the fight as a “war to be won.”   Right, because that’s undoubtedly the only thing standing between us and victory.  Not, I don’t know, 30 years of war in Afghanistan, its status as just about the poorest and most violent country on the planet, its black markets in weapons and drugs, a terrorist sanctuary in Pakistan, its corrupt government, drug lords, war lords, and one of the most treacherous terrains imaginable for fighting an insurgency.

Forget all that, we just need some straightforward “messaging.”

In short, there are basically two intelligent points in there.

#4 Sketch a vision in terms of achievable objectives and #8 Be honest about the cost and make a case why the cost is worth it. These are just fairly rational, obvious points in my book.  If you are sending troops into a battle zone, you need to say you have a plan and why the risk is worth it.  Basically, everything else can be deleted or is so obviously going to happen (Is Obama really going to avoid calling our troops heroes?!) as to be unnecessary.

Feaver then follows up with a list of indicators that Obama is not really serious about being Commander in Chief.  Don’t bother asking how Feaver can get inside Obama’s head  and divine his inner feelings.  As you can imagine, these points are basically the opposite of list 1:  e.g. he calls the soldiers victims instead of heroes.

[Read more →]

Yet again the US puts all its eggs in the basket of democratic proceduralism as a mechanism to try to build a centralized state create governance/legitimacy.  Both prongs of that strategy (the democratic and the centralized state build-up) are failures and events like this only confirm this obvious fact.

Reading the briefings of various governmental personnel (both Afghan and Western) in this BBC piece is a rather disheartening exercise.  My favorite is from Gordon Brown:

A spokesman said the PM had “spoken to President Karzai to congratulate him on his re-election” and the two men had “discussed the importance of the president moving quickly to set out a unifying programme for the future of Afghanistan”.

Good luck with that one.

I meant to get to this last week, but Steven Pressfield has published on his blog a strategy paper by a Major Jim Gant that deserves serious attention.  You can download the pdf of the entire document from that link.  Gant titles his piece “One Tribe at a Time.”  It is based on the presupposition that the natural governing social fabric of Afganistan is tribal.  While the US has built its entire mission to date–including a possible Stanley McChyrstal-style all-in counterinsurgency program–around the twin foci of a centralized state versus the Taliban (and allied insurgent groups).

Meanwhile, the actual makeup of the vast majority of the country–namely, the tribes–is completely missed.  Afghanistan’s history shows that even when the country did have a functioning state (prior to the Russian invasion, Civil War, and Taliban takeover), it was a very weak one that only had influence in the cities.  So instead of imposing a strong, centralized government, let the President of Afghanistan become the Mayor of Kabul.

There’s no “unifying programme for the future of Afghanistan” that is going to come from the top-down.  Certainly not from Karzai and any US/NATO mission (with 10,000 or 40,000 more troops) that is built around the legitimacy of a centralized state.

As someone who was heavily involved in operations throughout the country, Gant seems to understand this.  Gant befriended a local tribal leader and basically practiced a properly scaled (i.e. at the level of tribe) counterinsurgency operation.

Gant argues for small US teams that embed completely as training/fighting/assistance forces within Afghan village tribal structure.  They would create the equivalent of tribal police forces/fighters.  As Gant himself admits in the paper you still have to deal with warlords, the drug trade, and the sanctuary in Pakistan.  It’s a mess.  [Read more →]

The Obama administration has proposed a very, very narrow objective, which is counterterrorism, and a very maximalist, broad definition of how to achieve it, which extends to counterinsurgency and the defeat of the Taliban, and basically the fixing of the entire Afghan state. And the whole problem with this strategy is its very narrow aim is connected to this hugely ambitious means.

That’s Rory Stewart, laying out a very precise and well thought out criticism of the Obama administration (and by extension the military generals) in relation to Afghanistan.

Here he gets to the heart of it:

I think what we’re talking about is actually state building, not nation building, which is to say that it’s very blind to politics, to religion, to history, to culture, to context — the kinds of things from which nation [building] is composed.

Nation building could only be done by an Afghan Thomas Jefferson. It’s a job for a founding father. It’s an indigenous project. State building, in the view of the Pentagon, is a very technical, technocratic process where there are certain things just listed off: civil service; legitimate monopoly on the use of violence; good financial administration; the rule of law; a pragmatically regulated free market. It sometimes seems to be a little bit like the recipe for building a garden shed or baking a cake. It’s a management consultancy tool for fixing a state.

The COIN strategy advocated by many in the military (and some in the administration it would seem) talks about clearning, holding, and building. Clearing areas os insurgents, holding the territory (called population-centric warfare), and then building.  In many cases building a state.  But also building buildings, schools, roads, local government, and a whole host of other things.

But here’s the problem:

Counterinsurgency is the most fashionable thing at the moment because the U.S. military believes that’s what allowed them to turn around the situation in Iraq. Afghanistan, however much people claim otherwise, is really about Iraq. It’s really about the fact that people said it couldn’t be done in Iraq and it was done.

And a lot of the U.S. military think if we manage to pull it off there, we can pull it off again. … What they forget is that what made it work in Iraq is all about Iraq. It’s all about Iraqi politics; it’s all about Iraqi government; it’s all about Iraqi landscape. You try to move the same thing over to Afghanistan, where you don’t have that kind of government, you don’t have that kind of landscape, you don’t have that kind of politics, it’s not going to succeed.

What Afghanistan does not have is a history of a strong central state, a history of a large national army/police force, or a middle class, nor a heavily urbanized existence.

To wit: [Read more →]

So I’m breaking my own rules in this second post (a little bit).  I said these posts would only be buitl around the interviews in this PBS documentary, but then Peter Bergen had to go and write a really important piece in TNR that merits some comment.

The central thrust of Bergen’s argument is:

“Today, at the leadership level, the Taliban and Al Qaeda function more or less as a single entity.”

Bergen here means the high leadership level of both the Afghan Taliban (or more properly Quetta Shura led by Mullah Omar) and The Tehrik-i-Pakistani, i.e. The Pakistani Taliban (now under the leadership of Hakimullah Mehsud).

The evidence he provides is substantial with Bergen arguing that al-Qaeda has essentially become a kind of embedded military trainer for The Taliban leadership.

Bergen then proceeds to knock down various counterarguments that for example al-Qaeda will move to Somalia or Yemen and thereby be as effective as in Pakistan-Afghanistan.  Or that the internet allows for more training or that urban centers in the West are grounds for the training of terrorist attacks.  As to the latter, the real operational training took place in Afghanistan and Pakistan, whatever logistical and coordinational plans were hatched in Western cities (e.g. Hamburg in 9/11).

Bergen is the Western world authority on al-Qaeda, so I think he makes a persuasive case that the leadership of the Taliban and al-Qaeda are in deep symbiosis.

However there is this point:

And it is also true that Taliban foot soldiers today are fighting for any number of reasons–ranging from cash payments, to tribal opposition to the government, to a hatred of foreigners.

This leaves a potential opening for what in COIN terminology is called separating the reconcilables and the irreconcilables.  The reconcilables being drawn from the “foot soldier” ranks, the irreconcilables being the top layer leadership.

Now reconciliation to what?  And here I think Bergen near the end of the article leaves something to be desired. [Read more →]

This weekend I finally managed to have the time to sit down and watch this excellent PBS Frontline documentary called Obama’s War. Highly recommended and hats off to the folks at Frontline for a very good piece of work on an extremely important topic.  I’m going to do a number of posts all branching out of this doc this week. One of the key strengths of this film is that it gets some very big name folks on all sides of this issue.

As Andrew Exum (who by the way has the greatest avatar in the blogosphere), one of the ones interviewed put it:

John Nagl, Bill Mayville and Stan McChrystal make a good argument for a counterinsurgency campaign, while Andrew Bacevich and an especially pithy Celeste Ward make a good argument against pursuing such a campaign. All sides, in other words, acquit themselves rather well. All sides, that is, save for the Pakistani officials.

Digging deeper into the Frontline site, there is a page with transcripts from all the interviewers.  There are a whole mess of them, but the best ones in my opinion are Steve Coll, Andrew Bacevich, John Nagl-Andrew Exum, and Rory Stewart.

Nagl, Exum, and McChyrstal are on the side of a full counterinsurgency (COIN) operation in Afghanistan following their work in Iraq, predicated on clearing insurgents, holding territory, and building infrastructure policy so that a central government might come into take over, thereby allowing a natural exit of US/NATO/ISAF forces.

Stewart and Bacevich, for various differing reasons, stand opposed to such a position.

While Steve Coll represents something of an in-between point of view.

So I’ll start with Coll.  His interview is here.  Coll has the best understanding of the history of Afghanistan, and as a guy with a history degree, I think it’s the best place to start.  [Read more →]

Richard Engel is one of the few bigger name TV correspondents on foreign policy I actually tune in for. And I think he shows why in this clip. He basically shoots down Gen. McChyrstal’s COIN/nation-building plan as really a bridge (not yet built) too far. He ends up probably where I’ve ended up on this issue: send in a few thousand (maybe 10?) more troops possibly to strategic places like maybe Kandahar, try to build the Kabul-Kandahar road, and send in trainers to build up an Afghan army/police (and/or get the Europeans to shift to that function as we for a short time take on more kinetic operations).  Do whatever it is we are going to do relative to counterterrorism in Pakistan.  And then basically get ready for the inevitable draw down coming in the next 2-3 years.  Try to get the country (as best as possible) in a state of not complete total chaos, recognizing that there is going to be at best, a managed chaos.

What I take to be Engel’s point is that whatever the theoretical merits of nation-building/COIN (which have been debated at the League in some detail), it is simply too late in this war to hit the re-start button.  History is on the side of that assessment.  We went into Afghanistan, quickly won the war without completing it (i.e. let bin Laden get away) and then had no provisions for 8 years towards building a state, that is winning the after-war peace.  Winning the stability, in other words, the actual hard part.

Instead the US (along with the rest of the involved international community) backed a bunch of warlords and sent in slush funds of aid creating a kind of crony capitalism speculator’s bubble in the country, a rainy day economy of corruption, narcotics, and weapons.  We then installed a government that had no mechanism for re-integrating any members of the Taliban nor really gave sufficient representation to the Pashtun people, allowing the Taliban to take up their ethnic cause as their own (not entirely successfully to be fair, but to some degree a legitimator for them).  As Engel repeatedly states, essentially nothing has been built in since 2001 in Afghanistan.

Now we’ve seen what was clearly a rigged election, leaving the corrupt and corrupting government even more de-legitimized.  And now the President has won a Peace Prize (perhaps in an attempt to box him in on this war?).

To achieve victory in Afghanistan–defined as winning the peace–meaning a stable functioning government that has broad cross-ethnic appeal (and not crawling with various violent non-state actors) would take as McChyrstal honestly states, at least a decade of further entrenchment, 40-60,000 more troops over that time period, an Afghan army/police force numbering close to 600,000 persons, will cost (again as Engel points out) hundreds of billions of dollars, a regional diplomatic deal that would solve the Kashmir crisis, as well as bring in China, Russia, Pakistan, and Iran to accept the reality of an independent Afghan state that none of those countries uses as a forward position against any of the others.   The plan for which is laid out in detail in this piece by Ahmad Rashid and Barnett Rubin.

All of which is as if not more important than more troops that switch to population-centric warfare and kill some more bad guys.  Ask yourself honestly what are the chances that is going to happen?

Obama is above all else a pragmatist and the reality of all this has to be coming into clearer focus for him.  Of those objectives, he may be able to make some movement on the diplomatic front.  Maybe.  Some but probably not much.  He can create a training force for an Afghan Army/Police.  But he can’t afford that kind of investment of manpower or money for that length of time.

–

PS: Memo to the MSNBC folks–why is it so hard to embed your video? You might want to fix that ASAP.

But White House officials are resisting McChrystal’s call for urgency, which he underscored Thursday during a speech in London, and questioning important elements of his assessment, which calls for a vast expansion of an increasingly unpopular war. One senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the meeting, said, “A lot of assumptions — and I don’t want to say myths, but a lot of assumptions — were exposed to the light of day.”

Among them, according to three senior administration officials who attended the meeting, is McChrystal’s contention that the Taliban and al-Qaeda share the same strategic interests and that the return to power of the Taliban would automatically mean a new sanctuary for al-Qaeda.

The use of the parenthetical thought makes me guess that was Biden who is directly quoted there.  As a sidenote saying “I don’t want to say myths” says myths.

Anyway, this question of what exactly the relationship would be/is between the (Afghan) Taliban and al-Qaeda is the central one strategically.  And I have to say I don’t know.  There’s evidence suggestive of both directions.  For the record between the fork in the road that is the counterinsurgency strategy of Gen. McChyrstal (with Gen. Petraeus and Adm. Mullen supporting) and the Biden plan (with Gen. Jones? and maybe Jim Webb supporting?) which is a counterterrorism only focus, I would lean towards option #3, the John Robb approach (i.e. open-source counterinsurgency).  But that will likely not happen, so we are left the with the population-centric, really Afghan city-centric, counterinsurgency strategy and the counterterrorism one.

At this point I’m agnostic on this one.  [Read more →]

I think on that specific point he’s right.  Attempting to build a nation-state in Afghanistan will not destroy the threat of al-Qaeda (especially if AQ is hiding in Pakistan and as appears likely heading either to Yemen and the Horn of Africa and/or northward into Central Asia).

But I think he goes too far in the other direction with this point:

There’s not much evidence to suggest that a stable government in Afghanistan will lead to a lower overall incidence of terrorism.  Of the major terrorist attacks (against Western targets) since 9/11, the two largest – the March 2004 attack in Spain and the July 2005 attack in Britain – were planned and executed within the respective countries.  Indeed, the same is true of 9/11. What’s more, and as Matt Yglesias has repeatedly noted, the terrorist attacks that we’re really worried about – nuclear, chemical or biological attacks – are unlikely to be carried out by terrorist groups located in Afghanistan, or even Pakistan for that matter.  In all likelihood, those plots will be developed and carried out by terrorists within the targeted country.

The Spainish and British cases (even 9/11 for that matter) are a little more complicated in terms of geographic influence/causation.  For example, the idea of the plot for 9/11 was thought up by Khaled Sheik Mohammed.  Not in Germany nor in the US.  The Madrid attacks were largely funded by selling hash and ecstasy on the Spanish nightclub scene (which in Barcelona in particular has a very global makeup).  The hash largely coming from Morocco.

And the British attacks occurred through the pipeline of Pakistani extremism.

In other words, while the standard notion that attacks emanate from one point in the world–i.e. a failed state like Afghanistan–and therefore we need to go and create stable nation-states where there are failed states is really flawed, the opposite is not therefore true. Namely that terrorist attacks only perpetuate within the host countries.

Terrorism is much more like (or is) a black market criminal enterprise.  As such it is global, like all corporations across the planet.  The concept of “citizenship” or which nation-state is the site of the issue is largely a false frame in this age.  As Dan Drezner said, All Politics is Global.  Terrorism included.

I’m playing devil’s advocate here, as I’m very skeptical (as I’ve said before) of increasing troop presence in Afghanistan, but the alternative of assuming that all interventions only make situations worse (which I’m not saying is Jamelle’s position to be clear) is no good in my mind either.

We need some framework for this muddy in between.  Which is why I was so pleased to read Dr. Thomas Rid’s piece in The Atlanticist.  I recommend the post in full.  It’s very good.

He lists ten points to consider in an analysis of what to do re: Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the larger operation against terrorism.  Those ten points include insights from both camps–the Afghanistan is central to fighting al-Qaeda/US interests and those who oppose that view.  [Read more →]