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 [...]
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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 [...] 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 [...] Quote of the day material from Rory Stewart who cleverly sums up the mindset of our "strategic class" – an echelon of "experts" that establish a disturbing level of continuity in outlook from one administration to the next, Republican or Democratic: Since arriving at Harvard in June last year, [Stewart]has been consultant to several members of Barack Obama’s administration, including [...] Stephen Biddle’s recent piece on Afghanistan seeks to probe the question asked in the title, Is It Worth It? Biddle’s answer is a tepid, tentative "yes." In his words, our ongoing military campaign in Afghanistan represents "a war effort that is costly, risky and worth waging—but only barely so." As suggested, Biddle [...] Peter Bergen penned a piece in the Washington Monthly in which he argues that, with a substantial dedication of time and resources by the United States and the international community, Afghanistan could, eventually, become a "relatively stable and prosperous Central Asian state." In short, Afghanistan is a "winnable" war. The entire first half of [...] I don’t envy President Obama’s predicament in Afghanistan. It’s hard to think of a region that has been less hospitable to foreign interlopers throughout ancient and modern history (earning itself the moniker "Graveyard of Empires"). And yet despite this foreboding track record, it is unclear that President Obama is willing to deviate from [...] |
Blake Hounshell (aka praktike), our co-founder and main man, is now managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine. 
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