I don’t have much to say about this, but it serves as a good overview of some of the challenges we’ll face in Afghanistan in the next year. Ellen Laipson (formerly of the NSC) and David Frum did a Bloggingheads about the strategic issues confronting President Obama’s new strategy in Afghanistan. Two segments in particular stand out:
1. Voting as an exercise in ethnic politics (certainly not as absolute as they make it out, but as a broad point it’s fair):
2. Some of the issues facing development efforts there (interesting if only for how little they know of actual development work, and especially of doing it in Afghanistan, since neither has a background in it):
What are your thoughts?
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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