Saving Afghanistan - Robert Kaplan, The Atlantic
Afghanistan is about to spike in the news this summer, as 17,000 more marines and soldiers arrive from the United States and pour into the southern Kandahar region. They will advance down roads and river valleys where American troops have never ventured in eight years of war here, and deliberately stir up a hornet's nest of Taliban strongholds in Mullah Omar's backyard. This incursion will lead to fighting and attendant casualties perhaps on a scale that Americans have not seen since the early days of the surge in Iraq. It will be part of an ambitious effort whose scope American commanders here dare not name or admit to, even to themselves: nation-building on a grand scale. To succeed, they must overcome the Afghan landscape itself: a sprawling expanse of high desert wrinkled with tortuous hills and wave upon wave of cathedral-like mountain ranges that segment the population into countless valleys and separate regions. Indeed, for the first time since the U.S. invaded here in late 2001, Americans are about to lead a great battle against culture and geography...
More at The Atlantic.
Afghanistan Made Easy - Jules Crittenden, Forward Movement
To get, not to do. Enough with the hysteria/doom-and-gloom mongering. War correspondent Robert Kaplan, who has been around the block a couple of times in Afghanistan and with the United States military, with a note of reason on the evolving campaign, what that campaign is fundamentally about, why we can win it, and why we have to...
More at Forward Movement.