Jayshree Bajoria
Interviewees:
Interviewer:
President
For journalist and author
President Obama mentioned
Instead, there have been a series of media leaks that relate to what military strategy
These kinds of U.S. pressures may be in the cards, along with sweeteners, such as the promise of the
The Pakistani army is wrong on several counts, not least that the Afghan Taliban will be unacceptable to most Afghans, including the Pashtun population from where they draw their major support, or to
The outcome of [the] Obama administration's stretched
President
There is no guarantee that dispatching more soldiers will be any more successful in defeating the Taliban than previous troop surges. The reliance on military means in Obama's plan is accompanied by near silence on a political strategy. This assumes that a military solution can be successfully applied to
Obama's strategy poses two especially tough challenges for
Second,
Military escalation on its border (two additional U.S. brigades are being deployed in southern and one in eastern
-- It could produce a spillover of militants and al-Qaeda fighters into
-- It will enhance the vulnerability of U.S.-
-- The surge could also lead to an influx of more Afghan refugees, which can be especially destabilizing for
-- It could also provoke a spike in violent reprisals in mainland
President Obama has described the partnership with
Any expanded CIA role in
The government of
However, a number of issues give rise to skepticism in
Will
"After eighteen months, our troops will begin to come home." With that crisp sentence in his West Point speech, President
No amount of clarifications by the presidential team that followed helped dispel the notion that
Yet, there is hope that the surge will buy the allies time and space to deal with the Taliban from a position of strength with the language of war, a language that the Pashtuns understand. If the civilians then do their job and restore security and governance, with help from the Afghan forces and local tribal militias, then the president could eke out success and begin to "reintegrate" the non-ideological supporters of the Taliban in the territory cleared by the surge.
Today, the allies need to build the willing support of
U.S. Contemplates More of the Scarcely Believable in Afghanistan & Pakistan
William Pfaff
The idea is for the United States to bomb Quetta, one of Pakistan's principal cities, capital of its largest province, Balochistan, which already experiences separatist forces. Quetta is a major Pakistan military base, home of the century-old Command and Staff College inherited from the British army
(C) 2009 Council On Foreign Relations, Publisher Of Foreign Affairs