lynann, if you studied Afghan history you would find that they asked for help from the US immediately after gaining independence fro Britain in 1911.
We turned them down then and again in the 50's.
If you studied their history you would see we might have prevented Russia invading them in the first place.

Heres what your boy Juan says,

Monday, July 14, 2008
Obama on Iraq and Afghanistan: A Friendly Critique

Barack Obama wants to get out of Iraq by summer 2010 but wants to send 10,000 extra troops to Afghanistan.

Obama's editorial is thoughtful and far more sensible than anything we are hearing from the White House or McCain, and I agree with most of it. But I have one quibble and one major critique. The quibble is that Obama talks about leaving a small American force in Iraq after most of the troops are withdrawn, to continue to fight "al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia."


http://www.juancole.com/2008/07/obama-on-iraq-and-afghanistan-friendly.html

Cole calls the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan "the right war at the right time," and credits it with breaking up a network of al-Qaeda training camps which posed a danger to the U.S.[65] However, he charges that Bush

left the job half done in Afghanistan and ran off to Iraq, which was always irrelevant to al-Qaeda. There were no good [oil-related] targets in Afghanistan, just Bin Laden and Zawahiri.[63]
Cole complains that Iraq has displaced Afghanistan from the public consciousness. "As for money, Iraq has hogged the lion's share," he writes. "What has been spent on reconstruction in Afghanistan is piddling." [66] Talk of furthering democracy and women's rights, or eliminating opium poppy cultivation there, has all but evaporated.("Half of Afghanistan's gross domestic product now comes from poppy sales.") [67] Al-Qaeda now controls some territory in the south of Afghanistan, and is poised to return to power.[68]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Cole#Afghanistan

Cole: The Afghanistan war was the right war at the right time, and it did break up the network of al-Qaeda training camps from which terrorists would have gone on hitting the United States. But the fact is that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld did not want to fight that war after September 11. Rumsfeld sniffed that "there were no good targets" in Afghanistan. Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney all wanted to leave al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and attack Iraq first. At first Wolfowitz was leaked as the proponent of this crazy idea, and although he did back it, it is now clear from insider accounts like that of Richard Clark that the three top leaders just mentioned wanted Iraq first. The UK ambassador to the US maintains that it was Tony Blair who talked Bush into going after al-Qaeda in Afghanistan first, with a promise that he would later support an Iraq war. MI6 would have been briefing Tony about the dire threat coming from Afghanistan, and he, unlike the Bush team, could see the dangers of getting bogged down in an Iraq quagmire while al-Qaeda and the Taliban were still in control of Afghanistan. (Can you imagine the full scope of that disaster that Bush had planned for us?)

Even after Bush was dragged kicking and screaming into doing the right thing by Blair, he did it half-heartedly. He let Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri escape. (I'll repeat that. He let Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri escape). Instead of rebuilding and stabilizing Afghanistan, as he promised, he put almost nothing into reconstruction for that country.

Then he let the poppy growing industry come back with a vengeance. Afghanistan's GNP is $5 billion a year. At least $2 billion of that is poppies, and Afghanistan has become the top source for heroin in Europe. With al-Qaeda and the Taliban still powerful in the country or its borderlands, Afghanistan is on the way to becoming a terrorist's dream-- a place worse than Colombia from which narco-terrorism can be funded and launched. This looming disaster will certainly blow back on the American homeland. Yet Bush is doing nothing to avert it.
http://www.juancole.com/2004/07/arguing-with-bush-yet-again-president.html

LOL!!! He's a smart one aye?

Well, gee whiz what did you expect him to say about Iraq and Bush - I told you that he supports Obama twice. The first time you denied it.

You still don't address his latest writings on Afghanistan and Obama. Hint - I posted it but you said it was written by a fifteen year old boy.



Wikipedia may need to udate on Cole on Afghanistan

When was the last time that an al-Qaeda operative was captured in Afghanistan by US forces? Is that really what US troops are doing there, looking for al-Qaeda? Wouldn't we hear more about it if they were having successes in that regard? I mean, what is reported in the press is that they are fighting with "Taliban". But I'm not so sure these Pushtun rural guerrillas are even properly speaking Taliban (which means 'seminary student.') The original Taliban had mostly been displaced as refugees into Pakistan. These 'neo-Taliban' don't seem mostly to have that background. A lot of them seem to be just disgruntled Pushtun villagers in places like Uruzgan.

There has now been a rise of suicide bombings in Afghanistan, on a scale never before seen. One killed 24 people in a bazaar at Deh Rawood on Sunday. Robert Pape has demonstrated that suicide bombings typically are carried out by people who think their country is under foreign military occupation. If the US keeps sending more troops, will that really calm things down?

I don't know whether Senator Obama really wants to try to militarily occupy Afghanistan even more than is now being attempted. I wish he would talk to some old Russian officers who were there in the 1980s first. Of course, it may be that this announced strategy is political and for the purposes of having something to say when McCain accuses him of surrendering in Iraq.

If the Afghanistan gambit is sincere, I don't think it is good geostrategy. Afghanistan is far more unwinnable even than Iraq. If playing it up is politics, then it is dangerous politics. Presidents can become captive of their own record and end up having to commit to things because they made strong representations about them to the public.

I think Obama has a little bit of a tendency to try to fix his political problems by going overboard. Thus, he faces skepticism from Jewish American voters. So he made a Zionist speech in Boca. In the context of US politics, that is to be expected; he would not be any sort of politician, much less a phenomenon, if he did not try to reassure Jewish Americans about his commmitment to Israeli security, which is after all a worthy goal. But Obama went on to praise Zionist thinker Theodore Herzl, who started this nonsense about a people without a land for a land without a people. And then he gave away Jerusalem, undivided and permanently, to the Israelis in the middle of ongoing negotiations over its status between Israel and the Palestine Authority in the context of the Quartet, which the US government supports. Neither of those two things was necessary. It was overkill. And Obama now has some bridge building to do with the Arab and Muslim worlds if he becomes president, since Jerusalem is also dear to their hearts.

Search and destroy in Afghanistan is an even worse example of going overboard. My advice to his campaign team is to give more thought to how he can take a strong enough position on an issue to win on it, without giving away the whole store.

We who admire him don't want Afghanistan to become an albatross around the neck of a President Obama. I am old enough to remember one of the things that nearly killed the Democratic Party as a presidential party in the US, which was the way Lyndon Johnson let himself gradually get roped into ramping up the US troop presence in Vietnam from a small force to 500,000, and then still not win.

Afghan tribes are fractious. They feud. Their territory is vast and rugged, and they know it like the back of their hands. Afghans are Jeffersonians in the sense that they want a light touch from the central government, and heavy handedness drives them into rebellion. Stand up Karzai's army and air force and give him some billions to bribe the tribal chiefs, and let him apply carrot and stick himself. We need to get out of there. "Al-Qaeda" was always Bin Laden's hype. He wanted to get us on the ground there so that the Mujahideen could bleed us the way they did the Soviets. It is a trap.

Beware.

Juan Cole said...
Yeah, the original Afghanistan War of 2001 was done right. Very few US boots on the ground, backing Northern Alliance to overthrow Taliban and destroy al-Qaeda training camps.

That isn't what is going on now. There are 66,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan! When did I or anybody else sign on to *that*?

http://www.juancole.com/2008/07/obama-on-iraq-and-afghanistan-friendly.html

You conveniently left part of what he said out.

Obama's editorial is thoughtful and far more sensible than anything we are hearing from the White House or McCain, and I agree with most of it. But I have one quibble and one major critique. The quibble is that Obama talks about leaving a small American force in Iraq after most of the troops are withdrawn, to continue to fight "AL-Qaeda in Mesopotamia."
http://www.juancole.com/2008/07/obama-on-iraq-and-afghanistan-friendly.html
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
You left that out! So did dday!


Al Qaeda surrendered in.

Iraq: 70 al-Qaeda Fighters Surrender to US Forces…..
They reportedly borrowed the white flag used by their Democratic allies in Congress…..


Baghdad, 14 July (AKI ) - Seventy militants, many of whom are reportedly linked to al-Qaeda cells in Iraq, have surrendered to US forces in the Sunni area of Biji, west of Baghdad.

According to the Arab newspaper al-Hayat, the militants surrendered in the area of al-Siniya in front of local tribal chiefs.

After the mediation of tribal leaders, almost half of those who surrendered agreed to return to their original clans, hand over their arms to the Americans and promise to give up armed conflict if their names were removed from the most wanted list.

"Most of the people who were arrested are from al-Qaeda," said an Iraqi police source. "The rest were part of the Rashidin Army and the Islamic Army of Iraq."
http://www.weaselzippers.net/blog/2008/07/iraq-70-al-qaeda-fighters-surrender-to-us-forces.html

I gave plenty of links to others.
Just because it says Taliban doesn't mean squat. They are joined at the hip no matter what your professor of history claims.
That's your problem you only read what suits your beliefs!
Go back and read again.
I read 5 or 6 articles by the professor and he contradicts his self as bad as Bush.
He has no military or personal experience, its all academic.
I wonder who called him to speak to congress! I wouldn't put any more credence to what he said than what McConfused or Bush say after reading his Opinions.
I will listen to the military experts. Their knowledge and experience is real life and up to date, his is opinion!

I didn't conveniently leave nothing out. The OP you started was about the next president dealing with Afghanistan.

I vested my opinion about the dangers of escalating a dramatic troop surge in Afghanistan from what I had been reading about. Of course as you so often do to others on here you ridiculed my opinion and then as I defended my opinion you indicated my sources was from a blog from a 15 year old which was false. I knew that if I posted a creditable conservative article about such that you would dismiss it so I posted one from an Obama supporter. I still stand by my opinion of the current mission in Afghanistan. An opinion formed from reading far more creditable sources than all the left wing liberal media analysis that you flood this site with. And when you have the credentials of the professor let me know.

Obama's editorial is thoughtful and far more sensible than anything we are hearing from the White House or McCain, and I agree with most of it. But I have one quibble and one major critique. The quibble is that Obama talks about leaving a small American force in Iraq after most of the troops are withdrawn, to continue to fight "AL-Qaeda in Mesopotamia."
http://www.juancole.com/2008/07/obama-on-iraq-and-afghanistan-friendly.html

As usual you ignore the facts!!

I have studied the history of Afghanistan extensively, formed my opinion from dozens of sources, of varying walks of life. From Scholarly articles, Gov documents, military archives, Afghan sources (people), Russian KGB archives, Pakistani, as well as British military and gov archives and current events. (It is a changing history you understand.)
Not from one source looking for someone who might agree with me, but looking for facts! Hard evidence about what was in the past and led to the situation as it is today. I was graded on many of my papers and received high marks. I am not looking for a masters in history though, although I have been told I should, just the truth.
I think Ive found it, and until you can prove me wrong I believe I'll stick to that! I read your blog and more than just the one.
My opinion, based on his contradictions from blog to blog, is that he is as confused as McConfused. That's OK though I often find myself in disagreement with so called experts! (Not just this one!!)
That usually causes me to look deeper, to see why as in this case, the sources opinion is so different than the others Ive read.
That causes me to read more and more info, research deeper, and learn even more. Do that for 20 years, as is the particular history of Afghanistan with me, add it all up, and you will find out why I can comfortably disagree with your professor and call his blogs BS!

PS- Yes I am cocky, hard headed, and confidant! I can also admit when I'm wrong and have appreciated our past debates!