A useful survey of the condition of the various war theaters, written by noted journalist Bill Roggio, can be found here. The survey begins with this paragraph:
The US and her allies in Europe, the Middle East, and beyond have witnessed both stunning successes and dramatic setbacks in the Long War during 2007. Pakistan has continued its slide towards a failed state, with the government having relinquished control over additional territory to the Taliban and, thus, al Qaeda. Suicide bombings and attacks on all segments of the state plagued Pakistan as the Taliban and al Qaeda cemented their new safe havens. Iraq, which seemed all but lost at the end of 2006 as the US appeared to lose the all-important political will, has turned around with the change in counterinsurgency plan and the surge of troops US and Iraqi troops. Al Qaeda and the Iranian-backed Shia terrorists are losing ground and local support in Iraq. Afghanistan has seen its worst year of violence since the Taliban was defeated in late 2001; suicide bombings and IED attacks skyrocketed due to the problems in Pakistan.Read the whole thing; it's quite instructive. I'm still of the opinion that if we had taken this conflict a lot more seriously to begin with, along the lines described by John David Lewis here, we would have wrapped it up a long time ago.
1 comment:
I would suggest that the problem with WASTE (the War Against a Single Tactic Eternally) is not lack of seriousness, but false ideas.
For me, being serious means being focused on fundamental values. The advocates of WASTE are serious. They are focused on altruism in ethics, mysticism (in the form of faith) in epistemology, and God in ontology. These are their fundamental values, in a chain of causation: altruism has no rational basis so we must accept it on faith from a being in another dimension.
To put an end to WASTE requires a change in fundamental values--to egoism, reason, and reality.
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