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Inside the Beltway, outside the box
I'm crashing to finish a conference paper on why "wars of choice" last so long (and how to end them), so blogging will be fairly light this week. In the meantime, you might want to take a look at the CSPAN broadcast of a conference on Capitol Hill last week on Afghanistan policy, sponsored by the RAND Corporation's Center for Middle East Public Policy. Most of the speakers were thoughtful and worth a listen, although I was struck by how even the advocates of "staying the course" did not seem very confident of success. The "outside the box" perspective (in other words, disengagement) was represented by Chris Preble of CATO and yours truly. If you're interested in what we had to say, my presentation begins at about 2:35.00 into the broadcast, and Chris is right after me.
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Professor I commend you for calling out the political non-sense that would likely ensue from the 'Right' were the President to take your advice. And to do so while standing in Congress takes a lot of chutzpah.
For anyone that's interested, the Professor's remarks are nicely summed up in his post from 10/28. Chris Prebles citation of Simon Jenkins in the Guardian can be found here. The Arthur Keller op-ed (in the NYTimes) can be found
here.
Mullah Omar & Bin Laden = Russia/Sino Split?
Before 9/11 the Taliban welcome Bin Laden and allowed him to stage attacks from Afghanistan. Less than 5 governments even recognized the Taliban as an official government due to their atrocities (gender rights, terrorism, religious discrimination etc).
AFTER 9/11 the US offered to the Taliban and Mullah Omar a chance to hand over Bin Laden and Al Qaeda and save themselves from getting attacked. They refused.
To argue that there is some great split between 2 separate, foreign entities exists, similar to the those communist countries in the Cold War (Soviet Union, China etc) is pretty weak.
That was then, this is now.
That was then, this is now.
There is plenty of evidence to indicate there are significant differences in their interests and perspectives, so the argument that it is possible to split AQ and the Taliban is quite plausible.
A little clarification
In response to the attacks of 9/11 the Bush Administration boldly declared that the impending war would not simply be against the terrorists, but also the states that sponsor (house, protect, give free range of motion to) them.
Thus, when the Taliban leadership refused to simply hand over Bin Laden without first being presented with ample evidence of his ties to the attacks, the President proceeded to declare the Taliban as our enemy.
Are the people that are calling for disengagement saying that it was a mistake to originally conduct this war against the Taliban? If so, how then would we have exacted our bloodlust against Al Qaeda?
Virtually the entire world was willing to partake in ousting the Taliban for their obstructionist attitude.
And if you did agree at the time, then how can we now, 8 years after the fact, simply 'disengage' and allow there to be a scenario where the same government will again take hold (regardless of the prognostication of their future collusion with Al Qaeda)?
nice
Skip to 2:56:20 and Chris Preble will layeth the smack down on the people who hyped up the need for an Iraq war.