Barack's War

In an analysis in The New York Times last month, Michael Gordon noted that “Afghanistan presents a unique set of problems: a rural-based insurgency, an enemy sanctuary in neighboring Pakistan, the chronic weakness of the Afghan government, a thriving narcotics trade, poorly developed infrastructure, and forbidding terrain.”
The U.S. military is worn out from years of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their troops are stressed from multiple deployments. Equipment is in disrepair. Budgets are beyond strained. Sending thousands of additional troops on a fool's errand in the rural, mountainous guerrilla paradise of Afghanistan would be further madness.
With no military background and a reputation as a liberal, Obama Barack may feel he has to demonstrate toughness, and that Afghanistan is the place to do it. What would really show toughness would be an assertion by Obama as commander in chief that the era of mindless military misadventures is over.
”I hate war,” said Dwight Eisenhower, “as only a soldier who has lived it can, as only one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”
What's the upside to the United States, a nation in dire economic distress, of an escalation in Afghanistan? The chief effect of military operations in Afghanistan so far has been to push radical Islamists across the Pakistani border. As a result, efforts to stabilize Afghanistan are contributing to the destabilization of Pakistan, with potentially grim implications for the West.
No country poses a greater potential threat to western security than Pakistan. To risk the stability of that nuclear-armed state in the vain hope of salvaging Afghanistan would be a terrible mistake to match Bush's worst excesses.

A wholesale occupation is unnecessary. The United States is falling apart before our eyes. The government they and we are supporting in Afghanistan is a fetid hothouse of corruption, a government of gangsters and weasels kept afloat by billions in foreign aid. It is shot through with corruption and graft. From the lowliest traffic policeman to the family of President Hamid Karzai himself, the state built on the ruins of the Taliban government seven years ago now often seems to exist for little more than the enrichment of those who run it.If Obama does send more troops to Afghanistan, he should go on television and tell the world in the clearest possible language, what he is trying to achieve. He should spell out the mission's goals, and lay out an exit strategy. Otherwise it will become Barack Obama's war.