This article has to much of import to excerpt it effectively. It’s very much worth reading in full, and in concert with our previous entry on unrest in Iraq.
US losing the peace in Afghanistan
By Jim Lobe
Asia Times
WASHINGTON - Just as the United States is struggling to deal with major postwar headaches in Iraq, its efforts to pacify Afghanistan appear to be unraveling, according to a new report by a key group of experts sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Asia Society.
Titled “Afghanistan: Are We Losing the Peace?”, the 24-page document, authored by, among others, three retired senior US government policymakers who specialize in South Asian affairs, answers that question very much in the affirmative and argues that Washington must do far more, and urgently, to save the situation.
“Without greater support for the transitional government of President Hamid Karzai, security in Afghanistan will deteriorate further, prospects for economic reconstruction will dim, and Afghanistan will revert to warlord-dominated anarchy,” the task force concluded.
“This failure could gravely erode America’s credibility around the globe and mark a major defeat in the US-led war on terrorism,” added the report, which was written by the co-chairs of the independent CFR-Asia Society task force that has been following Afghanistan since before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against New York and the Pentagon.
…
In addition to devoting increasing energy to get Iraq under firm control, the administration is also increasingly preoccupied internationally with implementing the “roadmap” for Israeli-Palestinian peace and coping with the diplomatic fallout from both the Iraq war and its failure so far to find weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in that country. The alleged production and deployment of WMD by former president Saddam Hussein was cited by Bush and his allies as the main justification for going to war.
Continuing challenges to the US military occupation in Iraq, as well as the general insecurity there, has forced the Pentagon to deploy at least 140,000 troops there - twice as many as it had planned before the invasion…
…
In addition, tensions with Iran have been rising steadily over the past six weeks as the administration appears increasingly inclined to adopt a policy of “regime change”, which could include covert paramilitary action and even military strikes in a country whose population is roughly twice that of Afghanistan and Iraq combined.
“This is what is called ‘imperial over-stretch’,” noted one congressional aide whose boss has long warned that Bush’s post-September 11 strategic ambitions would stretch US forces impossibly thin within a very short time.
…
“If the administration fails to take the lead in providing more security and extending the authority of the central government,” said Barnett Rubin, an Afghanistan expert at New York University and a member of the CFR-Asia Society Task Force, “our policy in Afghanistan is definitely on track to fail.”
RSS Feed
Bill
The CFR report mentioned in Lobe’s article, “Afghanistan: Are We Losing the Peace?”, is available here, as a PDF file:
http://www.cfr.org/pdf/Afghanistan_TF.pdf
Please Leave a Comment!