End the Afghanistan campaign!

Here is the piece I did for yesterday's Register Sunday Commentary section on the problems with Obama's promise to beef up the "real central front in the war on terror" in Afghanistan. Citing people like George Friedman at Stratfor.com, with whom I had a nice conversation (he's much more mild-mannered and soft-spoken than you might think from his writing which can be brutally blunt) I think I focused on the realpolitik problems with beefing up the U.S. military. The problem is that the Taliban is indigenous to Afghanistan and the U.S. isn't. Friedman thinks we should pull U.S. military forces out of Afghanistan as quickly as is gracefully possible and use intelligence (and maybe special forces) to keep al-Qaida bottled up and ineffective in the Pakistani tribal areas where the writ of the government does not run. I'm certainly inclined to agree.

By way of comparison, here's the piece I did a few weeks ago for Antiwar.com. I'll keep harping. As I said in my interview for Antiwar Radio, there's a cottage industry of fairly respectable establishment types warning Obama that Afghanistan is a war he's unlikely to win. We need to keep the pressure on.