‘NEW COURSE’ Continuing with our global look at reaction to President Obama’s Afghan strategy, particularly within NATO, this article from Italy’s La Stampa will warm the hearts of those who believe that President Bush was on the right track. With some startling statistics, columnist Lucia Annunziata lays out the case for why Obama must follow the course laid out by the much-disliked...

Jeff Parker, Florida Today This cartoon is copyrighted and licensed to appear on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved.

The image comes from Tom Friedman describing the Obama decision last week as like “an unemployed couple who just went out and decided to adopt a special-needs baby,” to which he might have added “from a family that deals drugs and rear it in a neighborhood where the kids steal each others’ lunch money.” All the President’s Men (and Hillary Clinton) are on the TV circuit to...

What’s a country to do? According to Germany’s Berliner Zeitung, eight years into what by most accounts has been a badly-run invasion, Afghanistan is such a mess that it has no choice but to trust NATO – most importantly President Obama – to do the right thing. For the Berliner Zeitung, columnist Damir Fras criticizes Germany for its woeful training of the Afghanistan police, and in...

As always, with just a smattering of what Germans call schadenfreude, this article by Vladislav Vorobyev of Russia’s Rossiyskaya Gazeta lays out what, from Moscow’s point of view, NATO still doesn’t understand. First – that it isn’t Russia that NATO needs to worry about. And second – that the battle for Afghanistan hinges in no small measure on whether Washington can get...

John Darkow, Columbia Daily Tribune, Missouri This cartoon is copyrighted and licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved.

The Afghan Ambush by Michael Winship The decision has been made. The months of meetings and briefings are over. Tuesday night, the President made it official: 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan. Along with Friday’s announcement of an additional 7,000 from our NATO allies, after all those weeks of debate and consultation, the result’s pretty much exactly what our commander over there, General...

According to diplomatic correspondent Natalie Nougayrede of France’s Le Monde newspaper, President Barack Obama isn’t the only NATO leader going through contortions over Afghanistan. And in the case of President Nicolas Sarkozy of France there is a paradox: “after exhibiting the most spectacular gestures toward the United States at the end of the Bush era, he seemed to lose enthusiasm after...

If there was a high school yearbook category Person Most Likely to Stand in Front of a Tank To Stop It, I’d be the winner hands down. And yet, there’s no way I would support a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan post-haste. This blog entry, A Commitment Strategy to Afghanistan, by Lorelei Kelly offers a great explanation but here’s the crux for me (I recommend reading the whole column though): The...

http://worldmeets.us/images/obama.hope.afghanistan_hojemacau.gif Now that the decision has been made to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, few seem either pleased or optimistic. That would include columnist Francois Sergent of France’s Liberation, who writes in part: “He can no longer attribute everything to the disastrous heritage of his predecessor. From Jerusalem to Islamabad, the...

It looks like it might have. Even as popular opinion has begun to sour on the war both at home and abroad, NATO is going to answer the President’s call for escalation and pony up some more troops. Responding to American entreaties for more soldiers in Afghanistan, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the NATO secretary general, announced Friday that the alliance had agreed to contribute a further 7,000 “new forces”...

I meant to link to this post by Darren Hutchinson about the GOP’s fiscal priorities earlier, but it was just before Thanksgiving, and I wasn’t feeling that well, and… well… you know….

It was the lack of any Bushian pretense that our purpose in Afghanistan is to spread human rights or establish democracy (emphasis is Glenn’s):

I don’t know anything about the intricacies of publishing a newspaper, or about the relationships or sequence and timing between the on-line and printed versions of a major newspaper such as the New York Times. Although I am not a journalist, I remember from my Journalism 101 class that newspapers pay a lot of attention to their headlines—to every word and every punctuation mark. I am mentioning...

Boston Globe columnist Kevin Cullen wrote a good column based on an interview with Stephen Landrigan, a US aid worker who has spent five years working on humanitarian projects in Afghanistan. Landrigan supports the surge of troops, but recognizes that there isn’t a military solution to Afghanistan’s problems. Money quote: “It’s 99 percent economics,” Landrigan said. “You want...

What are the long-term gains/losses for the USA in sending more troops to Afghanistan? Is it a smoke-screen for America’s “other” ambitions? Or, is this another naive manifestation of the decade-old American foreign policy? Will the US “surge” in Afghanistan lead to more violence locally and elsewhere? In terms of future US containment strategy of China, Afghanistan air bases offer...

Getting it Right? A Half-Hearted Afghanistan Strategy Revealed by Michael Reagan As many of you will recall, in previous writings I urged President Obama to do the right thing when it came to providing Gen. McChrystal with his requested troop increases in support of the war effort in Afghanistan. And during the early debate over troop levels, I even accepted the president’s request for reasonable time to...

Cyrus the Great, who ruled Persia as the Roman Republic was just getting off the ground – and after the Jewish people had been ejected from Judea and exiled to Babylon. Why do Westerners, Jews and particularly Israelis mistrust Iran so? That seems to be the question that this historical defense of Iranian morality and behavior seeks to address. From Iran’s state-run Kayhan newspaper, Kian Mokhtari...

From what can be gleaned from editorials coming out of Pakistan today, President Obama’s long-awaited speech on his Afghanistan strategy has been anything but well received. Chief among Islamabad’s concerns is that more U.S. troops in Afghanistan mean more militants will flee into Pakistan – particularly from Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, where British forces will soon get a big...

Now that the President has announced his Afghanistan policies for the remainder of his current term, we can all move onto other things domestically and internationally. In several prior TMV posts, I was a vocal opponent of continuing or escalating the war. However I now support the President and sincerely wish our troops all the success their incredible dedication, sacrifice, and hard work deserve in one of...

WASHINGTON — President Obama has bought himself some time on Afghanistan and lived up to his promise to seek policies that fit into no one’s philosophical pigeonholes. He has also split his own party, diminished the enthusiasm of his natural allies, yet earned himself no lasting credit with his domestic adversaries. By these measures, Obama’s surge-and-wind-down strategy is both gutsy...

When the President unveiled his vehicle for getting from here to there in Afghanistan last night, it was not, as W’s chief of staff described the Iraq invasion in 2002, a “new product” but an eight-year-old jalopy retooled for an even longer, bumpier ride. As Barack Obama “assumed full ownership,” there was no shortage of tire-kickers, starting with John McCain, who judges wars...

Okay, here’s what I really think about President Obama’s strategy to fight al Quada in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It sucks. It is a short-term approach that in the end will not improve our national security. The president makes a good case for a stable, self-governing Afghanistan. That’s wishful thinking. He failed to convince me how that will translate to a more stable Pakistan which owns nuclear...

In his most recent editorial, Newsweek’s Editor Jon Meacham poses “Why Dick Cheney should run in 2012.” After dismissing the expected “rolling of their eyes dismissively” and warning Liberals not to spit out their lattes, Meacham explains that he is serious about a Dick Cheney bid for the presidential nomination in 2012, as such a run would be “good for Republicans and...

As expected, it was an admirable speech (transcript), regardless of the questionable content, but, then, we’ve come to expect such lofty rhetorical flights from Obama. The tone was serious, which it had to be, and, on the whole, the president made his case effectively, I thought. But do we buy the case? I do not. In making the case for war, Obama sounded at times a lot like Bush. Yes, there was good reason...