Thursday, May 01, 2008
Afghanistan - 29 Down; 5 to go?
This doesn't sound so bad...
In the Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens describes the current situation:
"But after a week spent shuttling between Kabul, Kandahar and Nangarhar province (in sight of Tora Bora), I found the notion of 'losing Afghanistan' to be, at a minimum, overblown. Afghanistan has 34 provinces. Twenty-nine of them are more or less at peace, more or less better off than they were six years ago, and more or less governed by someone their own people can live with.
That leaves five provinces that are the country's belt of real insecurity. Together with the adjacent provinces in Pakistan, these form what is sometimes called Pashtunistan, in reference to the ethnic group from which the Taliban sprang. In many ways it's another country. But even here the evidence that it is being 'lost' is slight."
