Quotes of the Day; Hell, Maybe Year…
Concerning George Packer’s Kilcullen on Afghanistan: It’s Still Winnable, But Only Just at The New Yorker’s Interesting Times – Richard Fernandez at Belmont Club sums up the dilemma we find ourselves in concerning Afghanistan and The Long War.
The bottom line here is that the War on Terror is far from over. Whether we are, as Churchill once said, not at the beginning of the end, but at least at the end of the beginning ultimately depends on whether there is a consensus in the West that can sustain the long campaign that Kilcullen describes. The limp response from NATO and the desire for quick fixes suggests that while the road to ultimate victory may be known, we may not want to go there. Where we will go on the road of quick fixes is another story.
More at Belmont Club.
And from Max Boot at Commentary’s Contentions – Kilcullen on Afghanistan.
He also pours some cold water on the dream of negotiating with an undefeated Taliban – that “is totally not in the cards,” as he puts it. As an alternative he suggests “community engagement” to win over local areas that are “tacitly supporting the Taliban by default (because of lack of an alternative).”
Read, as they say, the whole thing.
More at Contentions.
Also – Dave Kilcullen will be a guest of CNN this Sunday (1 PM ET) on Fareed Zakaria’s show GPS – the subject – counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.
