RealClearWorld - Afghanistan

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Failing to Learn Vietnam's Real Lesson - Frank Snepp, Los Angeles Times

Thirty-eight years ago last week, I was among the last CIA officers to be choppered off the U.S. Embassy roof in Saigon as the North Vietnamese took the country. Just two years bef...

You Can't Buy a Warlord, You Can Only Rent Him - Fouad Ajami, Hoover

In the unforgiving Afghan landscape, we have learned that you can’t buy a warlord. You can only rent one. We owe this education to our man in Kabul, President Hamid Karz...

The CIA Buys Trouble in Afghanistan - Sarah Chayes, Los Angeles Times

In a time when the whetted and arbitrary deficit-reduction knife is cutting bone out of critical U.S. government programs, the image of shopping bags stuffed with CIA cash handed o...

We've Already Lost in Afghanistan - Michael Rubin, Commentary

I am not an optimist when it comes to Afghanistan. The United States lost the Afghan war the second President Obama issued a public timeline for withdrawal and when diplomats off...

Can Anyone in Afghanistan Find Mullah Omar? - Ron Moreau, Daily Beast

A group of Taliban leaders are challenging those who say they speak for Muhammad Omar, the organization’s absent chief....

America's Drone Delusion - Steve Coll, The New Yorker

The Obama Administration has never made clear why it thought that capturing Awlaki and bringing him to trial was infeasible. Nor has it described the specific standards it used to ...

CIA Buying Afghan Influence with Bags of Cash - Matt Rosenberg, NY Times

For more than a decade, wads of American dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags have been dropped off every month or so at the offices of ...

CIA's Very Dumb Bags of Karzai Cash - Spencer Ackerman, Danger Room

Consider some of the U.S.’ goals in Afghanistan over the past several years. (Put aside whether you think they’re smart or stupid.) In 2009, the Obama administration be...

Churchill Was Almost Killed by Proto-Taliban - Con Coughlin, Telegraph

In 1897, British forces launched a bloody campaign against Pashtun tribesmen on the North West Frontier. It was the first time Winston Churchill, a junior cavalry lieutenant and as...

The Af-Pak Peace Tipping Point - Chaudhary & Samad, The Daily Beast

Relations between Kabul and Islamabad have soured since February when it was announced at a trilateral meeting hosted by the British Prime Minister that a peace deal may be pos...

Who Will Name & Fight Today's Barbarians? - Bill Kristol, Weekly Standard

In the 19th century, liberals like John Stuart Mill could write of civilization and barbarism. In the last half of the 20th century, as liberalism degenerated, it fell to conservat...

Here's How We Win the Afghan War - Bing West, National Review

National Review has asked me to comment upon the current state of affairs in Afghanistan. I don’t know what the current state is; I do know it doesn’t much matter. Let ...

Obama Rewrites the U.S. Contract Abroad - Michael Young, Daily Star

After the bomb attacks in Boston Monday, President Barack Obama hesitated to call them acts of terrorism. Obama and his officials soon rectified their conscious error, but the pres...

U.S., NATO Leave Afghanistan to Regional Tussle - Sajjad Ashraf, National

As the US and their allied forces begin withdrawing from Afghanistan, a process that will be completed by the end of next year, India and Pakistan continue to jostle to fill the va...

U.S. Must Interfere in Afghanistan's Election - Max Boot, Commentary

Michele Flournoy and Michael O’Hanlon are right to argue in this Wall Street Journal op-ed that the U.S. has a big stake in the outcome of Afghanistan’s April 2014 pres...

Another Afghan Civil War Looms - Con Coughlin, Daily Telegraph

Without some form of deal between the Afghan government and the Taliban, the country may well fulfil the select committee's prediction of another bloody civil war....

Has Pakistan Changed Its Tune Toward Afghanistan? - IISS

Has Pakistan really shifted its policy towards neighbouring Afghanistan and, if so, what lies behind the change? Reports of a policy reversal in Islamabad surfaced in November 2012...

Why Are So Many Afghans Drug Addicts? - Tahir Qadiry, BBC News

Afghanistan produces 90% of all opiate drugs in the world, but until recently was not a major consumer. Now, out of a population of 35 million, more than a million are addicted to ...

China's Afghanistan Challenge - Raffaello Pantucci, The Diplomat

China has an opportunity to assert leadership in helping steer Afghanistan in a more positive direction. Investing in Afghanistan now will save years of trouble later....

The West Is Fomenting Chaos in Asia - George Kerevan, The Scotsman

China's leaders -- even though many are technocrats educated in America's leading universities -- are just as much beholden to domestic opinion as President Obama. Washington and B...

The Real Road to an Afghan Peace - Amir Taheri, New York Post

With snow starting to melt in the mountains of the Hindu Hush, Afghans are preparing for another season of fighting in the 34-year-long war that has ravaged their country. And, l...

U.S. Can't Deliver Women's Rights in Afghanistan - Malou Innocent, CNN

Like his predecessor, Secretary Kerry has admirably pledged to prioritize women’s rights in his foreign policy agenda. But the underpinnings of this pledge – the entrenchme...

Seeing Khe Sanh, Thinking Kabul - Bing West, National Review

Like the South Vietnamese army in 1968, the Afghan army faces its government’s fall....

Why Hamid Karzai Is Confused - Biddle & O'Hanlon, Washington Post

Karzai is not, as some have claimed, crazy or a fool. He is confused. In his view, the world’s only superpower is surely able to defeat a ragtag force of Taliban guerrillas...

Either the U.S. Talks to the Taliban or It Loses - Ahmed Rashid, TNR

The American refusal to deal with the drug trade right after 2001, and its subsequent failure to build up the Afghan civil service and judiciary, and its long delay in building an ...

Great Game in Central Asia After Afghanistan - Josh Kucera, Diplomat

Could efforts by Russia and America in Central Asia exacerbate tensions and make matters worse?...

Iraq Today Is Afghanistan Tomorrow - Steven Metz, World Politics Review

A preview of the instability to come once America withdraws....

Kandahar and Hope - Michael O'Hanlon & Michele Flournoy, Brookings

Kandahar. Ancient crossroads of Central Asia. Home province of Taliban leader Mullah Omar, and the site from which Osama bin Laden began to prepare the Sept. 11 attacks. Epicenter ...

U.S. Must Secure Its Gains in Afghanistan - Buck McKeon, RCDefense

The war in Afghanistan is fast approaching an inflection point. This year, NATO military forces will transition from combat operations to a narrower mission limited to co...

U.S.-Afghan Point of No Return? - Pratyush, The Pulse

That the U.S.-Afghan relationship suffers from a fundamental lack of trust and friendship has long been an open secret. But the relationship could now be veering towards a point ...

Retreating from Afghanistan Is Never Easy - Con Coughlin, Spectator

Retreating from Afghanistan has never been a task at which the British military has excelled. Our first incursion in 1839 resulted in the wholesale massacre of an entire division, ...

We Should Actually Listen to Hamid Karzai - Daniel Serwer, Peacefare

In any event, listening to Karzai tells us something important about what is going on in Afghanistan: he and everyone else is adjusting to an Afghanistan where the Americans will ...

Karzai Welcomes Hagel with an Anti-U.S. Rant - Mujib Mashal, Time

If Chuck Hagel had hoped to have a smooth first visit to Afghanistan as the newly minted U.S. Secretary of Defense, he should have known better. Hamid Karzai has a long memory—...

Looking Ahead to a Post-Karzai Afghanistan - Washington Post

Little more than a year from now, visiting U.S. dignitaries will no longer have to face Mr. Karzai. What’s needed is a strategy to maximize the chance that his successor will be ...

To Hell with Karzai - Leslie Gelb, The Daily Beast

Hamid Karzai is beating up on the United States to score domestic political points once again, this time on the occasion of Chuck Hagel’s maiden visit as Defense secretary to ...

The Danger of an Afghan 'Moon Landing' - Dominic Tierney, The Atlantic

In one of his first major statements on Afghanistan as Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel defined America's "clear and achievable" objective in Afghanistan: "to have Afghans assum...

Russia Fears Afghanistan's Jihadist Whirlwind - David Satter, FPRI

As the U.S. prepares to withdraw from Afghanistan, perhaps no nation has more to fear from the consequences than Russia which faces the possibility of both instability in Ce...

Better U.S. Policy Could Have Prevented 9/11 - Pervez Musharraf, FP

The United States has blundered through South Asia over the past quarter-century, committing three major errors that have destabilized the region and led to the rise of internation...

How Obama Fumbled Afghanistan - Michael Hirsh, National Journal

Until he took the job as President Obama’s special representative, Richard Holbrooke was known as one of the toughest, smartest, and most nimble diplomats of his era. He had...

Now the Taliban Wants Peace? - Ron Moreau & Sami Yousafzai, Daily Beast

With a Qatar office, the Taliban hope that it will be able to more easily reach out not only to the U.S. and Afghans but to other nations in the Gulf, in Europe, and even to former...

Was Afghanistan Worth It? - James Joyner, The National Interest

The situation in Helmand is doubtless better off than when the Marines doubled down their effort there, making it "the defining battleground" of the campaign. Was it worth the 360...

Bye Bye Cold War, Welcome to the Cool War - Toby Harnden, Sunday Times

Although chastened by its "hot" wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington is anxious to limit the spread of the al-Qaeda franchise and is alarmed by the rise of its strategic rival ...

Come Home, America - Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, New York Times

Everyone talks about getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan. But what about Germany and Japan?...

Afghanistan Is Much Better Off Today - Peter Bergen, Foreign Policy

Quick question: Which Asian country has seen its life expectancy go up an astounding 18 years in just one decade, while turning from one of the world's most rural countries into on...

How Obama Froze Out Hillary and Lost a War - Vali Nasr, Foreign Policy

Obama has earned plaudits for his foreign-policy performance. On his watch, the United States has wound down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it finally killed Osama bin Laden...

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