Pepe Escobar: Obama's Afghan Spaghetti Western
It's painfully, obviously impossible to win local hearts and minds, curb drug smuggling, invest in nation-building and fight a CAEWWTDUH or OCO under these circumstances with such a set up. NATO is on a losing war - and the best political minds in Brussels know it.
But the crucial problem remains; the Obama administration is just remixing the Pentagon's operational priorities - same as with the acronym fiasco. For all practical purposes, strategically reviewed or not, GWOT, TLW, CAEWWTDUH or OCO goes on, with no end in sight, with the Persian Gulf as a secondary theater, Afghanistan-Pakistan and Central Asia as the primary theater, and ideology poisoning strategic vision.
This framework, inherited from Bush and his former vice president Dick Cheney, is incompatible with what can be glimpsed from some of Obama's speeches and actions, the lineaments of maybe a new, more equitable, American project. Yes we can? Not yet. There will be blood - a lot more blood - in this Afghan Spaghetti Western.
But the crucial problem remains; the Obama administration is just remixing the Pentagon's operational priorities - same as with the acronym fiasco. For all practical purposes, strategically reviewed or not, GWOT, TLW, CAEWWTDUH or OCO goes on, with no end in sight, with the Persian Gulf as a secondary theater, Afghanistan-Pakistan and Central Asia as the primary theater, and ideology poisoning strategic vision.
This framework, inherited from Bush and his former vice president Dick Cheney, is incompatible with what can be glimpsed from some of Obama's speeches and actions, the lineaments of maybe a new, more equitable, American project. Yes we can? Not yet. There will be blood - a lot more blood - in this Afghan Spaghetti Western.
posted by temporal at 3/28/2009
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