Afghanistan and Pakistan: Obama's Quagmire

No American President has ever enjoyed global goodwill in the way that Barack Obama does. He is not only young, deeply liberal, and idealistic, but everything he has said and done so far promises to bring back order, and a measure of sanity, to a world that is now in total disarray. The world cannot, therefore, afford to have him fail. But failure may be staring him in the face in Afghanistan because, despite a substantial change in approach, the ‘new’ strategy he unveiled on March 27 continues, in some of its essentials, to bear a striking resemblance to that of his predecessor. It therefore risks meeting the same fate.