The Afghan surge can’t defeat terrorist ideology, experts say. According to Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post, ‘President Obama should have used his speech to declare victory and announce the start of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan instead of an escalation. Even if the surge achieves its immediate mission—at huge cost—the operation won’t achieve its [...]

Obama’s strategy in Afghanistan has less to do with military action than ‘turning the war over to the Afghans.’ ‘The challenge lies in leveling the playing field by inserting operatives into the Taliban. Since the Afghan intelligence services are inherently insecure, they can’t carry out such missions. American personnel bring technical intelligence to bear, but [...]

U.S. President Barack Obama’s new strategy in Afghanistan, and consequently in Pakistan, has three core elements: ‘maintain pressure on al Qaeda on the Afghan-Pakistani border and in other regions of the world;’ ‘blunt the Taliban offensive by sending an additional 30,000 American troops to Afghanistan, along with an unspecified number of NATO troops he [...]

The new US troop surge has started to move into the homelands of ethnic Pashtuns in eastern and southern Afghanistan. Pashtuns are fierce fighters of invaders. They hate intruders. The Taliban are made up of ethnic Pashtuns.
Obama’s new strategy in Afghanistan, sending 30k new troops into the country, ‘will result in immediate spike in battles.’ [...]

US President Obama’s troop pledge to send thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan rests on a gamble on unreliable and dubious allies supposedly working towards the pressing goals in that country. The troop surge will have to rely on the corrupt Karzai government, perceived to be one of the most corrupt political administrations in the [...]

General McChrystal does not get his ‘40,000 new troops in order to hold the “major” cities and secure the population from the Taliban.’ He only gets a part of it. Obama did very recently order for additional troops to Afghanistan, but only about 75 percent of McChrystal’s request.
McChrystal’s plan, though, is by no means crystal [...]

There has been much confusion as to why the US persists to wage its war in Afghanistan when its target is al-Qaeda, a hugely diminished presence in Afghanistan, and not the Taliban, an ethnic group of domestic insurgents merely fighting for their cause in their local turf. US President Barack Obama, however, calls the war [...]

The bedrock principle in the debate on the war in Afghanistan rests on the idea that whatever military action the US undertakes in the country will only serve as ‘a prelude to, rather than a substitute for, Afghanistan taking over the security job.’
That is saying that the ‘White House wants to make sure surge will [...]

Former ambassador Ronald E. Neumann says, “The argument that we could pull out of Afghanistan if Karzai doesn’t do what we say is stupid. We couldn’t get the Pakistanis to fight if we leave Afghanistan; we couldn’t accomplish what we’ve set out to do. And Karzai knows that.”
Fraudulently-elected Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan received an ultimatum [...]

The massacre at Fort Hood occurred at a time when US President Barack Obama is at the final stage of decision-making about what to do with the US war in Afghanistan. The Afghan war has been proving to be a failure in the US antiterrorism mobilization, as well as its counterinsurgency campaign. US troops in [...]