History is bunk, said Henry Ford. To which another aphorism could be added: literature is literature, and shouldn't be mistaken for reality.
Historical and literary precedent is freely and mistakenly being bandied about in a good deal of international commentary on Afghanistan, whose thrust is that modernity is fated to fail in that country (even if the rest of the world has embraced it). Putting material and human resources at Afghanistan's disposal, such 'liberal' opinion claims, is a futile attempt on the part of the international community.
US president Barack Obama's Cairo address touched on the hot-button issues between the US and Muslim countries Iraq, Palestine, torture, Iran and offered substantive shifts from Bush administration policies on each of these. Most promisingly, by distinguishing between Iraq as "a war of choice" and Afghanistan as "a war of necessity", he's also corrected a West Asia-centric bias that dogged previous American policy. An extreme example of that bias is the manner in which the Bush administration barely focused on Afghanistan and Pakistan, where al-Qaeda's forces really were, while turning Saddam Hussein into a fall guy in order to be able to concentrate resources on Iraq.
http://newageislam.com/the-taliban-can-be-beaten-/radical-islamism-and-jihad/d/1453
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