"Asked if the United States was winning in Afghanistan, a war he effectively adopted as his own last month by ordering an additional 17,000 troops sent there, (President) Obama replied flatly, “No.”
Barack Obama, his administration in the midst of formulating a strategy for the U.S. forces in Afghanistan, allowed that one option will be negotiating with moderate Taliban forces there. Comparing the strategy with the one the U.S. used in Iraq, enlisting moderate Sunni forces tofight Iraqi and al Qaeda insurgents, Mr. Obama said:
“If you talk to General Petraeus, I think he would argue that part of the success in Iraq involved reaching out to people that we would consider to be Islamic fundamentalists, but who were willing to work with us because they had been completely alienated by the tactics of Al Qaeda in Iraq,”
“The
situation in Afghanistan is, if anything, more complex,” he said. “You
have a less governed region, a history of fierce independence among
tribes. Those tribes are multiple and sometimes operate at cross
purposes, and so figuring all that out is going to be much more of a
challenge.” (Link)
That will be a mean trick if the U.S. command can pull it off. Finding the moderates among the masses in Afghanistan may be a bit like finding needles in haystacks.
It does feel a bit like the Obama Adminstration is throwing up ideas against the wall hoping some will stick. The president recently announced he was sending an additional 17,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan and is now suggesting reaching something akin to the Sunni Awakening deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
But the fundamental questions remain. What is the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan? What is the end objective? How do we know when we can leave?
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