Word: troops
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Obama has ordered a Bush-style troop surge in Afghanistan. Warrantless wiretaps of Americans are still allowed. "Don't ask, don't tell" continues to ruin military careers, and Guantánamo is still open and booming. Unless Obama attacks these issues and leads or drags his Democratic colleagues in Congress into doing the same, his Administration may be seen someday as a curious pause before the Second Reagan...
...symbolism of Gates employing the very machines left behind by the Soviets is more unsettling than ironic. Before finally throwing his support behind McChrystal's push for a troop surge late last year, Gates repeatedly warned that even the Soviets could not win with 110,000 troops in Afghanistan. Gates should know, since he was one of the reasons the Soviets failed. As deputy director of intelligence at the CIA in the 1980s, he signed off on the decision to ramp up U.S. aid to the mujahedin, including the supply of Stinger antiaircraft missiles. Gates plotted with President Mohammed...
...familiar aspirations for boosting the country's security, development and governance, but fixed targets are in shorter supply - and some appear to have been scaled back. For example, Germany, the third largest contributor to the NATO mission in Afghanistan, had been under pressure from its allies to boost its troop commitment, but two days before the London summit it announced an increase of only 500 extra soldiers plus a so-called "flexible reserve" force of 350 deployable at short notice - far fewer than Washington had hoped for, and with an emphasis on training Afghan forces rather than engaging in frontline...
Despite a retooled strategy that links a U.S. troop surge to efforts to build the Afghans' capacity to govern and protect themselves, Western optimism over Afghanistan's prospects has continued to ebb. So, a key task of the Jan. 28 conference convened in London by Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown and co-hosted by Afghan President Hamid Karzai and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was to foster confidence that a positive outcome could be achieved sooner rather than later. "Today's conference represents a decisive step towards greater Afghan leadership to secure, stabilize and develop Afghanistan," declared...
...international community prepares to gather in London on Thursday to plot an endgame for the eight-year conflict, it is becoming increasingly clear that the war will end with the Taliban being restored to some measure of power. Indeed, the strategic purpose of President Obama's troop surge now appears primarily to be setting the table for an acceptable compromise with the Taliban...