Gideon Rachman
levels a serious (if slightly conditional) charge against Obama and his AfPak policymakers:
"When western politicians talk about “credibility” in Afghanistan, it is often their own credibility they are worrying about most."
Rachman compares the US approach to Somalia, where the "central government controls little more than a few blocks around the presidential palace in Mogadishu and the airport," and implicitly suggest that the US should
apply the Somali model to Afghanistan. That would mean accepting that outside military intervention is often counter-productive, that its human costs are too high, that state-building is unlikely to work and that the west should concentrate on bottling terrorism up, rather than trying to defeat it on the battlefield.
