Mark Bowden on Afghanistan

Mark Bowden writes that Obama should learn from what Bush did right on Iraq.

It is interesting that liberals are the ones turning away from counter-insurgency in that the whole theory of CI is "as warm and fuzzy as war can get." It is about protecting people and improving their lives. Half of it is stuff they do in the peace core. Of course, the ultimate goal of being nice to people is to get them to tell you where the people you want to kill are hiding so you can kill them. Still, since the main alternative advocated by the opponents of the counter-insurgency approach in Afghanistan is to let the Taliban have the villages, let them send girls back home to be traded like cattle or have their faces splashed with acid if they dare to learn how to read and at the same time have our soldiers stay off shore and call in the occasional air strike to assassinate the heads of the Al Qaeda organization from un-piloted drones, these reservations about the morality of a counter insurgency strategy seem misplaced.