A Regional Summit on the War in Afghanistan?

Matthew Henderson

10/15/09

This article is discussing the way the war in Afghanistan has changed as a whole. In the beginning many mistakes were made. The war has dragged on and on without much, if any, positive outcomes or reports. This war is now America’s longest war in the history of the country. The war has gone from trying to conquer the Taliban in Afghanistan to now trying to keep them out of Pakistan and India. Pakistan is now nuclear-armed and destabilized. The Obama administration should look at where the Bush administration went wrong in Iraq and do the opposite. Bush didn’t have the support of other countries going into Iraq. This article is saying that Obama needs to get the Regional support before activating a new plan.

I like that this article points out the mistakes that the Bush administration made at the start of the Iraq war. Obama should definitely be wary of making a similar mistake by not getting the support of the region. I think that the general support would go to any plan that had us getting out of that country as soon as possible and putting our money and minds toward more positive things. This is what I am in support of. We are in this thing because we believe they are a threat to us. And they probably are. What we need to look at is why they hate us. Maybe there is something that we are doing wrong that causes the world to hate us. These things could include our overbearing market and capitalism that just takes over wherever it goes, people may not want to be globalized, their way of life is being threatened, and then of course our tendency to just go in and kill whoever is in our way. Maybe we as a country should take a good look at ourselves and see that we are not perfect and think; we could work with the world rather than kill everyone that’s different to make the world how we want it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hoyt-hilsman/a-regional-summit-on-the_b_320845.html