[R-G] AEI and Afghanistan: Listen to Petraeus!

[Intense Red]

 > attended yesterday at the American Enterprise Institute -- there is
 > angst of another kind. They're worried that Afghanistan is a "war that
 > we may walk away from," as Danielle Pletka, AEI's vice president for
 > foreign defense policy studies put it.

   Realistically, she's right (but for the wrong reasons).

   Thinking like an imperialist (?!), the US "Silk Road Strategy" to control 
Central Asian resources is in tatters. The US went into Iraq for its oil and 
dominance of the Middle East. Afghanistan was the key for its proposed 
pipeline and control of Central Asia.

   Given the Georgian fiasco, the meteoric rise of Russian prestige and power, 
the US Central Asian military base reversals, the resistance the US is 
getting in Afghanistan and the potential Pakistani powderkeg, the Central 
Asian part of the US post-911 offensive is in shambles.

   Iraq, in comparison, is in relatively good shape from the imperialists' 
point of view. All that is needed there is a puppet dictator/some gov't that 
will continue the US dominance of Iraq.

   Iraq can be seen as a shorter-termed project -- lots of oil not far beneath 
the soil. Afghanistan -- its pipeline development and developing resource 
extraction from Central Asian republics -- was always the longer-term 
project.

   In such a world, Obama could be seen as shrewd to cut his losses in Central 
Asia and to focus on securing Iraq and Middle Eastern domination. This goes 
doubly so considering the present US economic state.

   It's interesting to see the neocons still advocating "full steam ahead" on 
both projects. That just increases the odds of failure for both.

-- 
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, 
in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who 
are cold and are not clothed." -- US President Dwight D. Eisenhower