Obama came forward to make his case for not only the continued war in Afghanistan but for an escalation. What the nation got was a mish-mash of clichés and rhetoric made to rouse a sense of patriotism and unity.
Are we willing to allow eight years of mistakes and mismanagement to go unmitigated, or do we risk more lives trying to at least clean up some of the mess before we bug out?
Is a graceful withdrawal and a less unstable puppet government worth more American lives? Are those lives really worth that "success"?
There were moments during the speech last night when if you closed your eyes, imagined the grammar a little mangled and a few words mispronounced, you could have easily been listening to President Bush.
The U.S. bears much responsibility for the destruction of Afghanistan during the 1980s and 1990s. We have a duty to help Afghans rebuild their country and to defend them against their enemy who we've long enabled.
President Obama's Afghan strategy is an attempt to give most stakeholders something to cheer about. Except in this situation the cheer sounds something like, "Well, yeah, okay, maybe...".
Security and press freedom can coexist, with the free flow of information recognized as the best weapon against terrorism, international media experts argued in a final declaration published this week.
As Albert Camus once said, "The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back o...
Biden deserves significant credit for key parts of the president's plan. According to a senior White House source, the vice president believes that the president's review has produced a sound strategy.
President Obama now has a difficult sales job to perform. In essence, his message will be: we need to get in deeper to get out of Afghanistan sooner. He's right.
Why lay out a withdrawal plan now? As a colleague in the Pakistani media told me, after they're assured that America's serious, the Afghan public will still want to hear that one day we'll leave.
Both the United States and Great Britain have failed to confront the role that Pakistan's fear of India plays in its conflict with Afghanistan. And more troops will only worsen what is already a misunderstood situation.
It troubles me that Obama is to give his big speech at West Point, because it only increases the pressure to pledge to the armed forces he will not permit an eventual end to the war that might prove their lives were lost in vain.
The condition of women has never been elevated in Pakistan, but the current climate of terror, militarism, and Talibanization has, and licensed a brutal gender oppression, inhumanity and violence.
Even a Roosevelt, a Kennedy or Reagan would have to deal with the reality that is facing Obama, in which domestic resistance and rising global challenges make it difficult for Washington to secure its military and economic hegemony.
Dear Mr. President: You and many of your constituents shave been praising each other on this Thanksgiving, holiday season, so why not one more? ...
After I asked my then-fiance to grow a beard, the biggest cliche that I've encountered has been hearing people tell him, 'Your beard makes you look like a [insert Taliban, mullah, religious fundamentalist].'
This year the number of poor people around the world struggling to get enough food for survival for themselves and their families has risen to a little more than a billion -- the highest level in 30 years.
I've never been one prone to hyperbole so take my word that calling award-winning journalist Ahmed Rashid one of the world's foremost experts on Afgha...
Maajid Nawaz is a British citizen of Pakistani descent who became involved in his youth with the radical Islamic Liberation Party (Hizb al-Tahrir al-...
While President Obama approaches a decision on America's war strategy in Afghanistan, across the border in Pakistan an equally important battle rages ...
