this is kind of a crappy headline. and it must be said that US intelligence has gotten it wrong on a great many of the major issues of the past; they were sure that iraq had WMD, they were surprised when the berlin wall came down, shocked when the soviet union collapsed, and were caught unaware when iraq invaded kuwait.
from my admittedly inexperienced point of view, I see the sense in avoiding a full blown "nation building" effort in a afghanistan. more often than not, "nation building" is an exercise in REbuilding everything that your military just destroyed; it implies that there is (or at least was) an infrastructure. but in afghanistan, it would literally be building from nothing.
Are Obama advisers downplaying Afghan dangers? WASHINGTON -- As the Obama administration reconsiders its Afghanistan policy, White House officials are minimizing warnings from the intelligence community, the military and the State Department about the risks of adopting a limited strategy focused on al Qaida, U.S. intelligence, diplomatic and military officials told McClatchy.
Recent U.S. intelligence assessments have found that the Taliban and other Pakistan-based groups that are fighting U.S.-led forces have much closer ties to al Qaida now than they did before 9/11, would allow the terrorist network to re-establish bases in Afghanistan and would help Osama bin Laden export his radical brand of Islam to Afghanistan's neighbors and beyond, the officials said.
McClatchy interviewed more than 15 senior and mid-level U.S. intelligence, military and diplomatic officials, all of whom said they concurred with the assessments. All of them requested anonymity because the assessments are classified and the officials weren't authorized to speak publicly.
The officials said the White House is searching for an alternative to the broader counterinsurgency strategy favored by Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, and Gen. David Petraeus, the head of the U.S. Central Command.
White House officials, they said, have concluded that McChrystal's approach could be doomed by election fraud, corruption and other problems in Afghanistan; by continued Pakistani covert support for the insurgency; by the strains on the Army, Marine Corps and the federal budget; and by a lack of political and public support at home, which they fear could also undermine the president's domestic priorities.
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