Next Stop: A Muslim Nation »
Posted By Progressive 8 months, 1 week ago in Religion
Obama has wowed crowds from London to Prague, but he faces his biggest test in Turkey tomorrow on his first visit to a Muslim nation. Reza Aslan on why it will take more than charm to convince the Muslim world the Clash of Civilizations mentality is finally over.
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Progressive
There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing. -- Oscar Wilde
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hyperbola8 months, 1 week ago
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This story is "feel good" state-propaganda for americans. The Turks are certianly better informed about how Obama's actions completely belie his "fine words".
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The secrets of Obama's surge in Afghanistan
Is United States President Barack Obama telling it like it is as far as his new strategy for the Afghanistan and Pakistan war theater - AfPak, in Pentagonspeak - is concerned? There are reasons to believe otherwise. ...
The Afghanistan-Pakistan war has got to be 2009's prime theater of the absurd. It took the New York Times and the usual "American officials" something like 13 years to "discover" that the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) - a Central Intelligence Agency twin - helps the Taliban. And this while the CIA, alongside their ISI pals, is compiling a mega hit list in the Pashtun tribal areas inside Pakistan. Maybe this is what US Central Command supremo General David "I'm always positioning myself for 2012" Petraeus means by a "trilateral" love affair, as he told CNN's State of the Union. ...
Obama is selling the surge basically as nation building, based on trust. A hard sell if there ever was one - as Washington cannot trust the ISI or the Pakistani government, while the Pakistani masses don't trust Washington.
Insistent rumors in Washington point to a troika - Holbrooke-Petraeus-Clinton - finally being able to convince Obama that the surge should be just the first step towards long-range nation building. Anyone with minimal familiarity with Afghanistan knows this is an impossible strategic target. ...
Richard Holbrooke, Obama's special envoy to AfPak, finally let it slip on CNN: the "people we are fighting in Afghanistan" are essentially ... Pashtuns. This was followed by a stark admission: "In the informational side ... we don't have a strong enough counter-informational program to combat the Taliban and al-Qaeda."
So this amounts to the State Department admitting that the Pentagon/Petraeus "humint" (human intelligence) component of counter-insurgency in AfPak, hailed as a gift from the Messiah all across US corporate media, is essentially useless. This also means there's no way of winning local hearts and minds.-
hyperbolaComment removed: Spam
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