Congratulations on your assimilation to Teh Borg.

This has been the Republican strategy since the beginning: create “facts” on the ground that force the next president to pursue the same idiotic policies in fear that to do otherwise would have worse consequences. It is the ultimate in “framing.” Obama is not as smart as I think he is if he allows Bush and Cheney to frame all of his choices in this way.

Bob in HI

What Obama needs to do is to figure out what constitutes an achievable objective in Afghanistan that a war-weary country (both the U.S. and Afghanistan, and throw in Pakistan for good measure) can agree to.

Afghanistan became a haven for Al Qaeda and the Taliban because it was, in essence, a failed state. Obama is going to need some good minds to figure this one out.

Bob in HI

Johnny McTelepromtper will be banging rocks together & screaming at trees when giving commands to our soldiers in Afghanistan.

Barack Obama will actually be listening to his Commanders on the ground in Afghanistan.

Johnny will let Osama remain free.

Barack will get him (or reveal to the world that Osama died years ago).

“The world promised reconstruction to Afghanistan; it was to be thrust from the medieval rule of the fundamentalist Taliban into the booming twenty-first century. However, progress has materialized only in scattershot fashion across this country where elite villas, five-star hotels, and fabulous malls for a very few take precedence over roads, schools, and farms. Hovels were bulldozed to make way for expensive housing for Kabul’s wealthiest residents—top government officials and their lackeys. Hundreds of refugee families living on government-owned land in the posh Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood were ejected from that prime real estate. Mansions and malls tower over mud-and-burlap vendor stalls in a clash of priorities between, on the one hand, a tribal, Islamic culture and, on the other, secular, gotta-have-it, drug-infused venture capitalism. The latter influences everything, including international aid organizations.

Daily, Afghans thread their way through a traffic jam of abbreviations emblazoned across Land Rovers: UN, UNESCO, UNDP, ACF, MACA. No reliable figures exist on the overhead of the three hundred and fifty Kabul-based aid agencies, but indirect signs—air-conditioned Land Rovers, Nissan Pathfinders, Toyota Land Cruisers, and luxurious residences—suggest a high figure. The average cost of maintaining a foreign UN employee hovers around two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Every time an aid agency convoy leaves Kabul, they spend as much as twenty thousand dollars on security teams. Add to that the soaring cost of monthly rentals—as much as fifteen thousand dollars—and you have a tidy sum devoted to their upkeep.

Despite these few showy trappings of prosperity, most of Afghanistan still lies in ruins—along with the optimism that first greeted the US-led military coalition six years ago. The US strategy in Afghanistan has even unofficially allowed some Afghan warlords, recruited by the Bush administration, to fight al Qaeda and the Taliban for control of Afghanistan’s flourishing opium trade.

“Who doesn’t want money?” says Shirish Ravan, project coordinator for the Kabul office of the Illicit Crop Monitoring Program of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. “The money is guaranteed. It doesn’t rot. It’s not like fruit but more like gold.”

These warlords use profits from drug trafficking to fund their armies and amass power, further weakening the nearly impotent Karzai government—all under the auspices of the US war against terrorism.”

One understands Obama’s need to sound macho. Rival John McCain has been beating his chest, proclaiming, `I know how to win wars.’ Polls show Americans trust McCain three to one over Obama as a war leader. Unfortunately, recent US presidents seem to require small military conflicts to prove their political virility.

But Obama has long called the US-led occupation of Afghanistan a `good war,’ a view most Americans and Canadians share. They see Afghanistan – and now Pakistan – as hotbeds of al-Qaida and Taliban terrorists that must be eradicated.

It is distressing to see Obama succumb to the blitz of war propaganda over Afghanistan and adopt George Bush’s faux terminology of terrorism. Before Obama urges widening America’s war there, he should consider:

*Al-Qaida never numbered more than 300 men. There are hardly any left in Afghanistan. Survivors scattered into Pakistan. Finding them is police and intelligence work, not a job for thousands more western troops”