Jonathan Steele: Nato is deeper in its Afghan mire than Russia ever was | Comment is free | The Guardian

Jonathan Steele: Nato is deeper in its Afghan mire than Russia ever was Comment is free The Guardian:

"Nato is deeper in its Afghan mire than Russia ever wasTwo decades after the Soviet withdrawal, ever more resources are being poured into a war with scant chance of success"

"...Nato is in a cleft stick and the idea that, unlike Iraq, Afghanistan is the "right war" is a self-deluding trap. A military "surge", the favoured Obama policy, may produce short-term local advances but no sustainable improvement, and as yesterday's Guardian reported, it will cost the US and Britain enormous sums. Pouring in aid will take too long to win hearts and minds, and if normal practice is followed, the money will mainly go to foreign consultants and corrupt officials. Talking to the Taliban makes sense under Najibullah-style national reconciliation. But the Taliban themselves are disunited, with a host of local leaders and generational divisions between "new" and "old" Taliban. Worse still, since the war spilt into Pakistan's frontier regions, there are now Pakistani Taliban...."

Read rest of article

Afghanistan: Obama’s Vietnam?

Gwynne Dyer: Afghanistan: Obama’s Vietnam?:
Thursday, 05 February 2009 16:30

YOU aren’t really the US president until you’ve ordered an air-strike on somebody, so Barack Obama is certainly president now: two in his first week in office.

But now that he has been blooded, can we talk a little about this expanded war he’s planning to fight in Afghanistan?

Does that sound harsh? Well, so is killing people, and all the more so because Obama must know that these remote-controlled Predator strikes usually kill not just the “bad guy”, whoever he is, but also the entire family he has taken shelter with. It also annoys Pakistan, whose territory the US violated in order to carry out the killings.

It’s not a question of whether the intelligence on which the attacks were based was accurate (although sometimes it isn’t.) The question is: do these killings actually serve any useful purpose? And the same question applies to the entire US war in Afghanistan...

The two questions [Obama] needs to ask himself are first: did Osama bin Laden want the US to invade Afghanistan in response to 9/11? The answer to that one is: Yes, of course he did. And second: of all the tens of thousands of people whom the US has killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, would a single one have turned up in the US to do harm if not killed? Answer: probably not...."