Monday, June 21, 2010

rajeev on rediff.com: a u-turn on the afghan issue? is obama thinking of staying on?

jun 21st, 2010


A U-turn on Afghanistan?

 

Rajeev Srinivasan wonders whether the US is making a mid-course correction on Afghanistan

 

These are not good times for US president Obama. Hailed as a savior if not a messiah just eighteen months ago, he is now reeling from several crises. The BP oil spell has left him looking incompetent and uncaring. The $1 trillion stimulus package may have avoided a Great Depression, but unemployment hovers near 10%. His big achievement, healthcare reform, has left a sour taste with almost all sections of society.

 

But most of all, the Afghanistan quagmire is getting worse. Just this week, seven US soldiers were killed in a single day; the public is getting tired of body bags and elusive promises of success. Maybe there's a re-think. A series of unexpected events took place recently that, if put together, may signal a mid-course correction by the US:

 

  1. A report from the London School of Economics and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University that emphasized the very high level of co-operation between Pakistan's government, ISI and the Taliban
  2. A major story in the New York Times about the discovery of large mineral deposits in Afghanistan
  3. Severe ethnic riots, resulting in a breakdown of normal activity, in the republic of Kyrgyzstan, where an important US air force supply base in Manas is used to support the war effort
  4. The resignations of Afghanistan's interior minister and security chief, among other things, taking responsibility for an attack on a loya jirga, but also suggesting a hardening of ethnic differences
  5. Reports that the Afghan President Karzai has lost faith in the ability of the NATO forces to actually win the war
  6. Reports that the much-anticipated counter-insurgency surge in Marjah, which was hailed at the time as momentous, has bogged down and that the rebels are gaining strength

 

All these have to be seen in the context of Obama's policy of increasing the number of soldiers on the ground first, and then beginning to wind down the US war effort and withdrawing troops in 2011, just in time to declare victory and use the halo effect to effortlessly win the 2012 presidential elections.

 

That dream is, to put it mildly, in some jeopardy now. The Obama plan was to surge, bribe, declare victory and run like hell. They have done the surge part, and are in the process of bribing (usually the ISI and its pals), but it's not going well. The bribees are not acting as expected – Afghans seem to be taking the bribes and merrily continuing what they were doing anyway.

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3 comments:

shankar said...

unrelated comment.

Did Arundhati Roy adapt "To Kill a Mockingbird" as "God of small things". I have a tamil article here that accuses her of that: http://uyirmmai.com/Uyirosai/Contentdetails.aspx?cid=3058

I'm not expert enough to translate. If anyone has more info on this, please publish.

thanks

Ghost Writer said...

this staying on is unlikely to happen - the brits are already counting their losses and the canadians have given up. the yanks do not have staying power ....specially so close to the hans backyard....

Arvind said...

The claim that the stimulus saved the economy is flawed. Printing money and handing it to cronies does not save anything. The economy is still in the doldrums and people are switching to gold. The expected inflation has started kicking in.

To Shankar: Susan Roy ABSOLUTELY plagiarized from To Kill a Mockingbird. When I first plodded through her book, that was the feeling I got. Ever since, I have searched on a regular basis to see if there was anyone else who felt the same way. A Russian said the same thing a few years ago (google for it), but the best evidence has been presented by Minu Ittyipe (google her, I once posted a link to her piece here) who gives a lot of details. My take is that there were similarities between two other books that I have read. I am sure she must have plagiarized from a bunch of sources.