Afghanistan

[TheMercenary]

WASHINGTON – New steps are urgently needed to broaden and accelerate work to keep
nuclear weapons and the materials needed to make them out of terrorist hands, according
to Securing the Bomb, 2007, a report released today.
“With al-Qaeda’s central command reconstituting in the mountains of Pakistan, we
urgently need a stepped-up global campaign to secure every nuclear weapon and every
significant cache of potential nuclear bomb material worldwide to stringent standards,”
said Dr. Matthew Bunn of Harvard University’s Managing the Atom Project, the report’s
author. “We need to make sure these stocks are locked down before thieves and terrorists
can get to them – and that they stay that way for the long haul.”

http://www.nti.org/c_press/release_stb07.pdf

[xoxoxoBruce]

Another warning from Mike Yon.
Some excerpts

While Russia takes American money and gains influence over our Afghan efforts, we will continue to spend lives and tens of billions of dollars per year on Afghanistan in an attempt to civilize what amounts to Jurassic Park.
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The sum of many factors leaves me with a bad feeling about all this. The Iraq war, even during the worst times, never seemed like such a bog. Yet there is something about our commitment in Afghanistan that feels wrong, as if a bear trap is hidden under the sand.
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Predicting the trajectory of a war is fraught with peril, like predicting next season’s hurricanes. Anything can happen, and often what changes the course of a war has little or nothing to do with the war. For instance, a failing global economy, or supervention of some chain of events perhaps still unimagined could cause the Af-Pak war to become less relevant. Caveats behind us, it seems that 2009 will see the sharpest fighting so far. That much has been clear for some time, and 2009 is now within our headlights. We can already resolve from the fog much of what is likely coming this year. Imagining what is beyond the headlights, my guess is that 2010 might bring the sharpest fighting of the entire war. My guess is that 2010-11 will likely be crucial years in this process, and that many allies will be making decisions during those years whether to stick it out or to punch out. By the fall of 2010, we should be able to resolve whether our renewed efforts under President Obama are working or failing.