Thomas Walkom
Obama is continuing the policy, started by his predecessor George W. Bush, of bombing suspected Taliban hideouts in Pakistan. As well, the U.S. has sent about 70 military "advisers" into that country.
We shouldn't be surprised. When he was campaigning for the presidency, Obama promised to vigorously pursue the Taliban into their Pakistani sanctuaries. At the time, he was criticized as naive. The smart money said he'd never follow through. Apparently, the smart money was wrong.
In fact, Obama's Afghan strategy seems remarkably similar to that of Bush. Bush, too, embraced the so-called three D's, defence, development and diplomacy, all of which have been U.S. and NATO orthodoxy since 2003.
It's true that in the early years of the war Bush focused solely on force of arms. As then defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously noted, America wasn't in the business of nation-building.
But by 2003, that began to change. As the Taliban regrouped, the U.S. realized that it was caught in a full-scale insurgency that required a more sophisticated response.
punditman says...It is nice to see some honest analysis of the Afghanistan situation within the mainstream media. Given the economic position that the US and Canada and the entire western world finds itself in, it seems rather counter intuitive to spend even more money on another hopeless war. People need to stop putting Obama on a pedestal and take a hard look at his actual policies rather than his rhetoric. Is there any difference between his and Bush's approach to the Afghan quagmire? Punditman can't see it, at least not so far.
