Vicious Rants of an Angry Yellow Man

Obama is now on his trip to show that he will be a capable president on foreign policies. It can help him because of the extensive coverage he is getting. It also helps him now that Maliki is agreeing with his plan for withdrawl from Iraq. Of course, a trip of this length means there is a great chance of making a major mistake. So I think he will be very cautious and not make any big announcements and just talk in general terms. For example while in Afghanistan yesterday he just say he wants to add couple of brigades to Afghanistan but no real strategy. McCain says that he will add 3 brigades before realizing that to do that he would have to take troops out of Iraq which is what Obama wants to do. But neither one has any great strategy at this point.

Of course the problem with Afghanistan was that all momentum was lost when we switched the focus to Iraq. Now the Taliban and al qeada have regrouped and with the help of Pakistan are causing big problems. Additional troops will help a little but force alone won't do it and besides our troops are exhasted. In fact if we put in a large force it will seem like we are invading again. The Afghans may understand the attack the first time but now they will ask why we abandoned them and now come back again? They may believe the Talibans who say that we are like the Soviets who attacked them over 20 years ago. The large Soviet army got into a big mess and we don't want to do that now. We have to regain the trust of the people because we had left them holding the bag 5 years ago.

We have to help rebuild the economy and infrastructure in Afghanistan as fast as possible. While Kabul is doing ok, the rural areas are in big trouble. Most of the income is from opium. With any drug trade there is corruption and lawlessness. But what do you expect poor peple to do? If opium is the only way to make money you can't blame them for growing it. Unless you can help people make money from something else, you can never have stability. In Iraq it was not just the surge that calm violence. American troops started paying the locals to help them. The troops also listened to the people's problems and tried to help them. Eventually the locals find that the foreign insurgents were the troublemakes. People who used to shoot Americans are now helping them because they trust our troops more than they trust foreign insurgents. We need to establish that trust in various provinces of Afghanistan as soon as possible. Building roads, bridges, schools and hospitals will be more cost effective than bringing in large number of troops. I like to see what ideas that the two candidates can come up with other than putting more troops in.