For the left in the Bush era, America's two wars have long been divided into the good and the bad. Iraq was the moral and strategic catastrophe, while Afghanistan--home base for the September 11 attacks--was a righteous fight. This dichotomy was especially appealing to liberals because it allowed them to pair their call for withdrawal from Iraq with a call for escalation in Afghanistan. Leaving Iraq wasn't about retreating; it was about bolstering another front, one where our true strategic interests lie. The left could meet conservative charges of defeatism with the rhetoric of victory. Barack Obama is now getting ready to turn this idea into policy. He has already called for sending an additional two U.S. brigades, or roughly 10,000 troops, to the country and may wind up proposing a much larger escalation in what candidate Obama has called "the war we need to win."
But, as Nagl understands at the ground level, winning in Afghanistan will take more than just shifting a couple of brigades from the bad war to the good one. Securing Afghanistan--and preserving a government and society we can be proud of--is vastly more challenging than the rhetoric of the campaign has suggested. Taliban fighters are bolder and crueler than ever--beheading dozens of men at a time, blasting the capital with car bombs, killing NATO troops with sniper fire and roadside explosives. Meanwhile, the recent savagery in Mumbai has India and Pakistan at each other's throats again, a development that indirectly benefits Afghan insurgents.
The challenge of exiting Iraq was supposed to be the first great foreign policy test of Obama's presidency. But it is Afghanistan that now looms as the potential quagmire. Winning the good war will, at a minimum, require the most sophisticated counterinsurgency techniques developed by Nagl and his colleagues, which take enormous resources. But, even then, it's not at all clear what victory looks like, or whether it's even possible in a country known as the graveyard of empires. All of which raises the question of how much longer Afghanistan really can be considered the good war.
Who's on first and what's on second? Obama ventured into Islamic territory this week sporting a slight mustache and using his middle name to add to his resume that's intended to gain some support with the Muslim community. Some bought it and some said it would take more than sweet rhetoric to change things. One guy who wasn't buying any of it was Osama. You know, the bin Laden guy?
Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden told Muslims to prepare for a long war against "infidels and their agents. We either live under the light of Islam or we die with dignity ... brace yourselves for a long war against the world's infidels and their agents," the militant leader said in an audio tape was posted on an Islamist website on Thursday.
Parts of the tape were aired on Wednesday in which he accused U.S. President Barack Obama of planting the seeds of hatred towards the United States among Muslims.
Now Osama has a new kid on the block to take down. It was easy to get the troops riled up against George Bush, but what's one to do with this Barack Hussein Obama guy? It's getting harder to the militants to find shelf space to showcase their goods. Probably the only way to get the attention back into the mountains of Pakistan is to blow something up and soon!
President Barack Obama sought to change Muslim perceptions of the United States on Thursday in a speech that urged Arabs and Israelis to declare in public the realities he said they accept in private. Addressing the world's more than 1 billion Muslims from Cairo, Obama called for a "new beginning" in ties between Washington and the Islamic world in his speech that also tackled grievances over two U.S.-led wars and tensions over Iran. Bush did all he could but of course he's a Texan. Obama has lived among the Islamic tribes.
Some Muslims welcomed Obama's fresh tone after George W. Bush's departure even as others expressed frustration that he failed to outline specific changes to U.S. policy, reflecting skepticism in the region Obama must still overcome. But, WORDS won't change much. Now comes the next shoe. What follows the speech? What are the "action points" that will verify a real CHANGE in relations?
Special Courtesy by Ali Jaan.
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