Menon is a bleeding vagina. Though he brings up valid points of the troops to population ratio the fact of the matter is that no one wins if the taliban is allow to continue operations. Caving to he demands of terrorists will only embolded and lead to further recruitment to their numbers, even more so than our not so great PR campain. Creating staggering, bloody losses for the enemy will lessen their ability to sustain any sort of overt operations and degrade their recruiting efforts. Lets not loose sight of what this organization pulled off in 2001.
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* Pledge, along with regional states, not to interfere in or attack Afghanistan—providing the Afghan government refrains from hosting Al Qaeda or other terrorist. Obama should also suspend UAV attacks in Pakistan so long as the Taliban maintains the ceasefire.
* Organize an international consortium to finance the long-term rebuilding of shattered Afghanistan and to improve life in Pakistan.
Should this plan fail, the United States will have lost nothing. Obama will still have 60,000 troops in Afghanistan at his disposal. Negotiations with the Taliban would amount to a major shift in policy, but the administration and Gen. David Petraeus have already hinted that that they'd consider holding discussions with moderate insurgents.
Some will insist that the United States must remain in Afghanistan until democracy takes firm root and economic recovery becomes self-sustaining; others will object that America has the responsibility to ensure equal rights for women and minorities; still others will claim that the United States must prevent radical Islamists from entrenching themselves in Pakistan.
Yet its unclear whether America can hope to achieve these outcomes, desirable though they are. Ramping up the war to transform society will only create a backlash; better to focus on containing terrorist groups and Islamic radicals, who in any event have plenty of other unstable or failed states from which to operate.
Candidate Obama said that he would negotiate with America's enemies. President Obama has the chance to do so in Afghanistan.
Menon is the Monroe J. Rathbone Professor of International Relations at Lehigh University and a fellow at the New America Foundation.
© 2009
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