Road Map for Afghanistan - David Ignatius, Washington Post opinion
Last October, the Bush administration arranged a briefing for aides to Barack Obama and John McCain on the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. Among the expert advisers was David Kilcullen, an Australian counterinsurgency guru who had been one of the architects of the U.S. troop surge in Iraq.
"We said the situation was extremely difficult in Afghanistan, with a security crisis and a political crisis occurring at the same time," Kilcullen remembers. Obama had been talking on the campaign trail as if Afghanistan's problems could be fixed by adding more U.S. troops. The briefing was a wake-up call that the next president would face some agonizing policy decisions...
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