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[RealClearWorld] RealClearWorld - Articles - Lessons From Six Years in Iraq: Indeed, the war has made journalists and Iraqis alike strangely immune to the human side of the conflict. As suicide bombings and other insurgent attacks in Iraq continue to cause hundreds of casualties a month, one Iraqi recently remarked that “No one values the victims anymore.” After six years of fighting, and with attention shifting to Afghanistan, we must be careful to continue to build and honor relationships with our Iraqi partners”” interpreters, public servants, and others who have aided our work--as well as the ordinary Iraqis who have been caught up in the violence since 2003.

[Silenced Majority Portal] Silenced Majority Portal: Six Years of War in Iraq - Capsule ...: Al Quaida has remassed in Afghanistan, which was relatively ignored in favor of the protracted misadventure in Iraq. Troops may exit by 2011 but the situation is still ugly. 

[AfterDowningStreet.org - Bush-Cheney Trials in '09] Which Way Forward for Anti-War Forces? | AfterDowningStreet.org: A profound and protracted economic crisis, such as the entire capitalist world is going through now, is bound to eventually produce an upsurge of resistance among the working class. Once the rebellion against capitalist exploitation takes hold among the workers, once consciousness of the antagonism between “them and us” becomes widespread, it sets the stage for their rebellion against being used to enable a war for the exploiters””either as workers or soldiers.

[Top 10 POLITICO Story] Can Obama win in Afghanistan? - Michael O'Hanlon - POLITICO.com: An international defeat would deliver a crucial blow to Western strategic interests – Washington would lose a foothold in a region where rival powers such as Iran wield growing influence, and its ability to strike at Islamic extremists such as Al Qaeda would be greatly diminished.

[The American Conservative] The American Conservative » Negotiate with the Taliban, Free John ...: You said, “…at the age of 16 while living in white bread Orange County ”” traveled to Pakistan in 2000 to indulge his faith, got swept up in the fundamentalist cause to purify Afghan Muslims by joining the jihad and took up arms with the Taliban against the “infidel” Northern Alliance. He trained in camps that were allegedly funded and run by Osama bin Laden…”.

[Dangoor's Weblog] 100000+ Allies troops for Afghanistan: McCain’s “100 year us ...: Consistent with President Obama’s projection that Afghanistan will need to have some 400,000 military and police personnel before it can take care of its security needs, for the US to clean-up the tougher parts of Afghanistan (including an area across the border in Pakistan,) in preparation for Afghanistan to take over the security responsibility, will require an overwhelming force, likely MORE troops than were committed to Iraq at the peak of that campaign.

[Afghanistan Monitor] Afghanistan: A misread war | Afghanistan Monitor: In many ways this is a misreading of what happened at the end of 2001 and through 2002, when the George W Bush administration was hugely confident of its success against al-Qaida and was already looking ahead to eliminating the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq.  It was a period of great optimism - even euphoria - on the American side, fuelled by the characteristic neo-conservative mix of vengeful outrage and ideological zeal after the attacks of 11 September 2001.

[rabble.ca - News for the rest of us] Who's Obama proving to be? | rabble.ca: But leaving the darker side of his agenda aside for the moment, let's look at Obama's domestic agenda and how he intends to sell it. Obama, in a strategic move loaded with delicious irony, is using the right's strategy of the 'useful crisis' (what Naomi Klein calls the shock doctrine) against them -- using the economic crisis to rewrite the purpose of government and bring it back to an activist and interventionist role much faster than anyone could have imagined -- or indeed could have accomplished in the absence of a crisis.

[Kanan48] A three-front war: Iraq, AfPak”¦Washington. By Paul Rogers « Kanan48: In both Afghanistan and Iraq, then, the belief that a short and intense military operation using overwhelming force would be enough to terminate the regime and ensure a clear victory foundered. Instead, in each case the initial phase of spectacular advance turned into a protracted war - now entering its seventh year in Iraq, and approaching its ninth year in Afghanistan.

[SWJ Blog] 15 March SWJ Roundup (SWJ Blog): If you believe the headlines, Afghanistan is "the graveyard of empires," a "quagmire" and a "fiasco," the place where President Barack Obama will meet his "Vietnam." In the media's imagination, the Taliban are on the march, and Kabul is on the verge of falling to a resurgent insurgency that already controls much of the countryside. Increasing numbers of voices, on both the left and the right, counsel that the war is unwinnable and that we need to radically "downsize" our objectives in order to salvage something from a failing war effort lest we go the way of the Russians or British, previous conquerors who foundered in this merciless land of violence and fanaticism.

[World Threats] World Threats » Blog Archive » Pentagon Rethinking Two War Doctrine?: For more than six years now, the United States has in fact been fighting two wars, with more than 170,000 troops now deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. The military has openly acknowledged that the wars have left troops and equipment severely strained, and has said that it would be difficult to carry out any kind of significant operation elsewhere.

[Chandler's Watch] Chandler’s Watch » Blog Archive » Officials: Afghanistan Taliban ...: WASHINGTON (AP) ”” The Taliban’s new top operations officer in southern Afghanistan had been a prisoner at the Guantanamo Bay detention center, the latest example of a freed detainee who took a militant leadership role and a potential complication for the Obama administration’s efforts to close the prison. U.S. authorities handed over the detainee to the Afghan government, which in turn released him, according to Pentagon and CIA officials.

[SWJ Blog] John McCain: Winning the War in Afghanistan (SWJ Blog): Thanks to the courage and skill of our troops on the ground and the wisdom of leaders such as General David Petraeus, Ambassador Ryan Crocker, and General Ray Odierno, the collapse of the American effort in Iraq was not just arrested but reversed. With the right strategy finally in place - and I should note the intellectual contributions to it by General Jack Keane, Fred and Kim Kagan, Andrew Krepinevich, and Gary Schmitt - and the resources on the ground necessary to implement it, we not only stepped back from the precipice of a strategic disaster of immense and long lasting consequences, but progressed toward obtaining our objectives in Iraq beyond the most hopeful projections for the new strategy’s success.

[Stephen M. Walt] Time to rethink our strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan | Stephen ...: I'd argue it wasn't so much the decision to invade Iraq that caused the major problem as the decision to actively play a role in governing and re-building it. That may have been the responsible, "good" thing to do, but it would have been less of a burden had the US simply decapitated the Saddam government and left the various factions in Saddam's government to fight it out (or wiped out the top people above the rank of colonel from the Iraqi army, then handed over control to whomever could guarantee their loyalty).

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