Are U.S. efforts in Afghanistan doomed for failure, or is there the potential for success? Experts reveal what may lie ahead.
Will the Afghanistan war become a repeat of the crisis in Iraq? Obama has already pledged to send more troops into Afghanistan and is now in the midst of hearing from military commanders and advisors about how best to proceed. You'll be paying for the war; wouldn't you like to know why?
Listen to an insightful discussion with experts on Afghan politics, society and culture and the implications of U.S. foreign policies.
Bio
Sophie Delaunay
Sophie Delaunay is the Executive Director of Doctors Without Borders of the United States/Medecins Sans Frontieres.
Sharad Joshi
Dr. Sharad Joshi a Research Associate at the Monterey Terrorism Research and Education Program (MonTREP). Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at CNS from Sept. 2006 to Oct. 2008. He holds a PhD from the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh. His research focuses on security issues in South Asia, especially nuclear proliferation and terrorism.
At the Monterey Institute's Graduate School of International Policy Studies, he has taught courses on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction in South Asia. He has worked as a visiting fellow at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis, New Delhi (Summer 2005), and adjunct instructor at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh (Summer 2006). Sharad has also done consulting work on terrorism financing as well as proliferation in South Asia.
Sharad earned a Master's degree in Politics (specialization in International Relations) from the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Rajasthan, Jaipur. He also holds a certificate in Asian Studies from the University of Pittsburgh, and briefly worked as a journalist for India Abroad newspaper.
Fariba Nawa
Fariba Nawa, an award-winning Afghan-American journalist, has made her selected work available on this site. She covers a range of issues and specializes in immigrant and Muslim communities in the United States and abroad. She is a correspondent based in the San Francisco Bay Area but frequently travels to the Middle East and South Asia. She lived and reported from Afghanistan from 2002 to 2007, witness to the US-led war against the Taliban and al Qaeda.
She has a master's in Middle Eastern studies and journalism and speaks Persian and Arabic. This collection of news articles, essays, radio reports and academic work include coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan, Muslim women's struggles and some pieces from her earlier reports on crime and criminal justice in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Her work has appeared in the Sunday Times of London, Newsday, Mother Jones, The Village Voice, The Christian Science Monitor and other publications. She also reports for radio, including National Public Radio (NPR). Her essays have been published in two books, March to War and Women for Afghan Women.
She's a speaker on Middle East and South Asian issues and has participated in talks at the World Affairs Council, major universities and has been interviewed by major television and radio networks. She is currently in the Bay Area working on a project about reconstruction and the drug trade in Afghanistan.
"Bias" is a term from cloth manufacturing, a "bias cut" being diagonal to the direction of the weave. If cloth is a metaphor for human philosophical assumptions, we are all biased. The interesting question is, which way does your weave run?
There seems no rational reason for the US or NATO to be in Afghanistan, so what might an irrational reason be?
"Anxiety" is a term related to "strangulation"--as in the idiomatic "choking". The US and NATO seem to be having an identify crisis if not psychotic break, and are "acting out" this psychodrama, which they explain as "defense of the homeland", on the homelands of people who never attacked them and have often been attacked by them.
So I would suggest we study anxiety in the US and Europe if we want to understand and affect what they are doing in Asia.
It is interesting that on such discussion forums there is no presence of Afghanis or Pakistanis, which is to say that the West continues to act and believe that it knows what these people think and want. Why not hear their voice in real time?
Why would a people want the presence of an external nation in their land? To promote peace? The existence of religious fundamentalism is the consequence of the most abysmal poverty in this region. Religion is an outlet for pent-up fury against three decades of strife. Power needs to be slowly devolved to the local people. For how long can the troops last in Afghanistan? Forever? And why is there this assumption that these people will tear each other's throats once the US pulls out - like children without an angry parent to supervise them. Well, the Afghanis are not children.
As for India: it doesn't have much stakes in the region, given the foreboding presence of the US. Also there is nuclear deterrence in the region. The military in Pakistan cannot be separated from a generalized Islamic flair - but that is not be confused with Talibanism. Much of the Taliban are pretty much detested in Pakistan's urban centers. The safety of the nukes isn't simply a matter of military secrecy but the cohesion of state infrastucture in Pakistan. The real question is: how long will that last?
Overall, the conversation in this video is quite biased.
If there is to ever be stability in the region, we need to butt out and let them work things out for themselves. We stuck our noses into the Afghan/Russia issue and that's why we were back over there again. Enough already.
Her remark, in this three minute excerpt, raises the question of whether it is in the US national interest or that of Afghanistan to provide the government in Afghanistan. Does government grow out of the soil of the people's experience? A man told me in Iraq that after we toppled their government, it was now necessary for a new government to grow up, because a government is like a tree.
Not a statue.
The moderator interrupted to try to "spin" her excerpted remark by asking "So they're afraid we're going to leave?" The US leadership is obviously afraid of something in "Afpak"--of being attacked by someone "tied to" Afpak, as President Obama put it last week.
I would ask her, "If you were Secretary-General of the UN, would you recommend the NATO/US force continue in Afghanistan (with operations into Pakistan), or is this force detrimental to the healthy if painful development of these two countries in the longer run, and thus to the stability of the world?" I could focus that better: what did she tell the Afghans who told her they wanted the US to "help but not to control"? Did she just nod her head and take a note? What does she think? You're right, I should watch the whole talk.
I wonder if the same rural-urban split she mentions in terms of progressiveness also applies to a sense of being under occupation--more of both in the urban areas? It would stand to reason and mesh with what she said about Iraq. There are commonalities in that we are trying to "nation-build" and "fight terror" in both places. How does she view that description of our general policy?
member. 
