|
|||||
|
Normally al-Qaeda affiliates just make threats they can only carry out in their dreams, but in this case I’m not sure sure: “Al-Qaeda has never attempted to seize and hold strategic territory, but this may be about to change, according to an audiotape message from the deputy leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). In [...] One justification for continuing (and possibly escalating) our military/non-military commitment in Afghanistan centers around the potential for al-Qaeda to establish safe havens in that country from which to coordinate attacks on US targets. This al-Qaeda-based rationale rests on several assumptions that include, but perhaps are not limited to: 1. If we withdraw or significantly reduce our military presence, the Taliban will retake Afghanistan (presumably that means the Taliban will [...] At long last, the Obama administration has provided a draft of its objectives with respect to the ongoing military occupation of Afghanistan, as well as a series of metrics for gauging the success in terms of meeting those aims. Unfortunately, the enunciated objectives are themselves typical of the muddled and contradictory goals, tactics and strategies associated with a mission that [...] Despite President Bush’s post-9/11, manichean-tinged attempt to categorize other nations as either “with us or against us” with respect to those terrorist groups that the US government considers problematic, and despite an understandable impulse on the part of the US government to put US interests ahead of those of other states (a tendency that spans administrations from both [...] Andrew Sullivan is right: The document reads, like so much else from the Cheney years, like a document from a South American dictatorship in the 1970s or 1980s. If someone had told me a few years ago that it had popped up in the Soviet archives, I would have believed him. Read the whole thing if [...] In reading the third and shortest chapter of Juan Cole’s Engaging the Muslim World, “The Wahhabi Myth: From Riyadh to Doha,” I was struck by something that wasn’t there. The point of this chapter is that Wahhabism does not cause terrorism, nor is Saudi Arabia the main exporter of anti-American violence in the region. [...] Marc Lynch makes a very good point: Suppose the U.S. succeeded beyond all its wildest expectations, and turned Afghanistan into Nirvana on Earth, an orderly, high GDP nirvana with universal health care and a robust wireless network (and even suppose that it did this without the expense depriving Americans of the same things). So what? Al-Qaeda (or [...] |
Blake Hounshell (aka praktike), our co-founder and main man, is now managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine. 
|
||||
|
American Footprints 125 queries. 0.812 seconds. |
|||||
Recent Comments