Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Gli statunitensi approvano il piano di Obama per l'Afghanistan

...almeno fino all'altro ieri. Magari poi cambiano idea.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601086&sid=a9eUj5.dzBVI
Il 62% � a favore del dispiegamento di ulteriori truppe in Afghanistan.
In generale approvano la sua politica estera, anche se non con un vasto 
margine, ed approvano la sua presidenza in generale (con un margine ancor 
pi� basso). Quel che disapprovano � il modo in cui affronta i problemi 
dell'economia. 

 ha scritto nel messaggio 
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Una fotografia dell' "americano medio". 

"outis" <xxxxx@xxxxxxx> ha scritto nel messaggio 
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B�, questo vuol solo dire che il sondaggio � stato svolto in modo corretto, 
direi. Ci mancherebbe altro che un sondaggio rappresentasse qualcos'altro. 
Se lo facesse, sarebbe fatto male.
Una questione di metodo, insomma. Quanto al merito, io personalmente mi 
sarei aspettato una minore approvazione dell'ulteriore impegno in 
Afghanistan - ma ovviamente era solo una mia ipotesi. 

 ha scritto nel messaggio 
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penso che gli americani in generale non siano cos� propensi al disimpegno 
totale come Obama. Mi sarei aspettato tuttavia un maggior appoggio sul lato 
economico. Probabilmente la questione della riforma sanitaria ha pesato 
molto. 

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Beh, questo ovrebbe garantire almeno qualche tempo per far funzionare
la strategia... ammesso e non concesso (per scaramanzia) che
funzioni ;-)

 wrote in message 
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#_Se si parla di campagna afghana sarebbe meglio che il cittadino americano 
non si riferisca troppo al Presidente.
Cogli USA in guerra comanda ancora "il militare" e un cambiamento 
sostanziale nella strategia in Afghanistan, dipende solo da quello.
C'e` un interessante ( ma lungo ) articolo in Asiatime online:
........
The day the general made a misstep
By Mark Perry
 President Barack Obama's national address last Tuesday not only detailed 
the United States' strategy on Afghanistan, it laid bare his new 
administration's strengths and weaknesses - and confirmed the growing 
suspicion that, eight years after September 11, 2001, meeting America's 
global challenges with a military response remains the default position of 
the Washington policymaking establishment.
"Don't underestimate the impact that eight years of the [George W] Bush 
administration has had in Washington," a senior State Department official 
explained this last summer. "The Bush people set out the language of the war 
on terrorism, invented the vocabulary, defined the terms. People talk about 
the importance of 'doing' diplomacy, but no one really knows what that means 
or how tough it can really be."
At least initially, this assessment seemed contradicted by the 
administration's flurry of diplomatic activity. Its first months were taken 
up by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's globetrotting, special envoy 
George Mitchell's high-profile Jerusalem meetings, AfPak specialist Richard 
Holbrooke's repeated initiatives with Pakistan's President Asif Ali 
Zardari - and Obama's decision to engage Iran in direct talks about its 
nuclear program.
Suddenly, surprisingly, the military seemed relegated to playing a minor 
role in Washington: Bush's hero David Petraeus, the US commander for the 
greater Middle East, was no longer in the headlines, the war in Iraq seemed 
well in hand and Defense Secretary Robert Gates was nowhere to be seen.
All of this changed in May, when a series of well-timed Taliban offensives 
led to a spike in US casualties and Gates decided to replace the US Afghan 
commander, David McKiernan, with Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal. The 
change did not come as a surprise to Pentagon officers, who had watched 
Petraeus and McKiernan struggle through a difficult relationship: "The two 
couldn't be in the same room together," a McKiernan aide says. "We knew 
there'd be a fist fight if we left them alone." The disagreement was 
personal: McKiernan resented answering to an officer whom he had once 
commanded and viewed as politically ambitious.
But the relationship was also scarred by a subtle disagreement over how to 
meet the Taliban challenge. Both McKiernan and Petraeus agreed that the 
Taliban posed a security challenge to the Afghan government, but McKiernan 
focused first on development - on building what he called "human capital". 
Petraeus disagreed: you can't build "human capital" without security, he 
argued, and the security situation in the country was deteriorating. Then 
too, Petraeus thought, what was needed in Afghanistan was an officer who 
could respond creatively to what Petraeus believed was turning into an 
asymmetric fight - and McKiernan was an officer with a deep background in 
running conventional wars.
McChrystal, a former Green Beret and a celebrated special operations 
commander, was the answer. Petraeus recommended a change to Gates, and Gates 
agreed. Within days of his May 11 appointment, McChrystal showed up in the 
Afghan capital, Kabul, with a team of counter-insurgency experts who 
commandeered McKiernan's headquarters and fanned out throughout the country.
McChrystal's teams were told to identify the problem and find a solution. 
"They absolutely flooded the zone," a US development officer says. "There 
must have been hundreds of them. They were in every province, every village, 
talking to everyone. There were 10 of them for every one of us." Not 
surprisingly, within weeks of their deployment, McChrystal's team leaders 
had concluded that the US was facing was an escalating insurgency that could 
only be checked with an increase in US troops. In-country State Department 
officials rolled their eyes: "What a shock. If you deploy a gang squad, 
they're going to find a gang," a senior State Department official says with 
a tinge of bitterness. "They were looking for an insurgency and they found 
one."
"From the minute that McChrystal showed up in Kabul, he drove the debate," a 
White House official confirms. "You'll notice - from May on it was no longer 
a question of whether we should follow a military strategy or deploy 
additional troops. It was always, 'should we do 20,000 or 30,000 or 40,000, 
or even 80,000'? We weren't searching for the right strategy; we were 
searching for the right number."
A senior State Department official, watching McChrystal from her State 
Department perch in Washington, remembers the frustration among the 
department's top policymakers: "We kept saying 'we need to open up to the 
other side, like we did in Iraq with the Anbar insurgency,' and the military 
kept saying, 'well this isn't Iraq.' And so we'd answer: 'fine, so if 
Afghanistan isn't Iraq, then why do you keep talking about a surge?' And we 
never got an answer."
The State Department's frustration extended into the embassy in Kabul, where 
the US ambassador, Karl Eikenberry, was having his own problems with 
McChrystal. The appointment of Eikenberry in March of 2009 had been greeted 
with skepticism in the State Department because of his background as a West 
Pointer, a retired lieutenant general and a US security coordinator in the 
country. But if anyone would be sympathetic to McChrystal, it was now 
thought, it would be Eikenberry.
But that's not what happened: Eikenberry won friends among professional 
diplomats for his easygoing manner and quick understanding of their 
problems - and for his open irritation at McChrystal's imperious manner. 
"McChrystal came in and he just thought he was some kind of Roman proconsul, 
a [Douglas] MacArthur," an Eikenberry colleague notes. "He was going to run 
the whole thing. He didn't need to consult with the State Department or 
civilians, let alone the ambassador. This was not only the military's show, 
it was his show."
But McChrystal was not only able to "flood the zone" in Afghanistan, he was 
able to do so in Washington. As the director of the Joint Staff, a position 
he held just prior to arriving in Kabul, McChrystal established the 
Pakistan-Afghanistan Coordinating Cell (PACC), a 70-person military-civilian 
operations group housed in the Pentagon's National Command Center, one of 
the most secure offices in the world. "This isn't a place you just wander in 
and out of," a senior Pentagon official says. The "PACC" bypassed the normal 
command structure - and the State Department. It reported to McChrystal, who 
rotated its officers in and out of Kabul every three to four months.
The PACC is "a stovepipe operation", this senior Pentagon official notes. 
"It's beautiful. It's headed up by McChrystal acolytes, former special 
operations officers who view him [McChrystal] as their patron. So they 
follow his lead. And there is no requirement for them to share any of the 
information they get from Kabul with the State Department or anyone else - 
let alone with Eikenberry. This is McChrystal's game. The PACC people in 
Washington pass information to McChrystal without going through any channels 
and they take the best information from Kabul and they brief [JCS chairman 
Admiral Mike] Mullen - and he briefs the president. So during the run-up to 
the Afghanistan decision, the military always looked current. They had the 
best information. Everyone else looked like a bunch of amateurs. Eikenberry 
was out of the loop. He had no chop [influence] on any of it. They just ran 
circles around him."
The tensions in the Eikenberry-McChrystal relationship came to be defined by 
Eikenberry's growing anger that the State Department's views were not 
getting an adequate hearing, either in Kabul or in Washington. That is: 
because the military was the sole voice in determining what was wrong in 
Afghanistan, they would be the sole voice in determining what to do about 
it. To deal with the first problem - in Kabul - Eikenberry confronted 
McChrystal after the general had had one of his private, face-to-face 
meetings with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. "Don't you think I ought to be 
a part of these meetings?" Eikenberry asked. McChrystal shrugged him off. 
"I'll keep you informed," he said. Eikenberry was enraged: the American 
in-country effort was supposed to be a coordinated military-civilian 
initiative. According to a Pentagon official, the Eikenberry-McChrystal 
confrontation, which "first took place in July", was repeated again and 
again. "It got worse and worse."
Eikenberry responded to the second problem - in Washington - by belatedly 
sending a detailed cable to the president laying out his disagreement with 
McChrystal's plan. The cable, which arrived in early November, urged the 
president to adopt "a low-end option" of deploying no more than 15,000 US 
troops as trainers to the Afghan National Army.
Eikenberry made it clear: America's problems in Afghanistan weren't going to 
be solve by killing people, but by helping the Afghans build credible 
governing institutions. The cable made its way through the upper reaches of 
the Washington policymaking establishment - the deputies committee, the 
principles committee and the National Security Council (NSC) - until it 
reached the president's desk. It was reviewed at the White House on 
Wednesday, November 9 (with Eikenberry present) as one of four options 
available to the president.
McChrystal was enraged. In mid-August, he and his team had spent weeks with 
Petraeus and Petraeus' staff in the region preparing to make their case to 
the president - including six days of intensive meetings in Qatar - for an 
immediate deployment of 40,000 US troops to Afghanistan to "gain the 
initiative and reverse insurgent momentum".
The McChrystal recommendation, contained in a 66-page memorandum, became the 
focus of a series of intensive White House meetings chaired by the NSC 
director, James Jones, throughout September. The meetings were detailed and 
exhaustive, what one Central Command (CENTCOM) officer described as "some of 
the most physically draining sessions I have ever participated in". Now, 
suddenly, Eikenberry was weighing in. McChrystal felt undercut. "Where had 
this guy been?" one CENTCOM officer asked. "It was pretty damned late in the 
day to be giving an opinion. And that's all it was."
American diplomats don't disagree, but defend Eikenberry by pointing out 
that McChrystal's decision to "flood the zone" was designed to take the 
impetus for handling the war in Afghanistan out of the hands of the State 
Department as much as it was out of the hands of the Taliban. Other voices 
and other views, they believed, had been cut out of the loop - and they had 
decided to strike back.
"You can only be treated like a bunch of idiots for so long before you get 
fed up," one State Department employee says. "It was PowerPoint after 
PowerPoint, all filled with this lingo and it all sounded pretty scientific. 
But it all amounted to the same thing - who do we kill. Well, it won't 
work."
State Department officials theorize that Eikenberry might not have weighed 
in at all had it not been for an inadvertent McChrystal misstep. It was no 
secret in Washington that Vice President Joe Biden was one of the few 
officials who questioned McChrystal's call for more troops, but when 
McChrystal was asked about it he fell on his face.
During a speech in London on October 1, McChrystal described Biden's 
skepticism as "short-sighted" - an embarrassing and bald abrogation of 
Gates' oft-stated rule that military officers should keep their mouths shut 
when it comes to disagreeing with elected civilian officials. The result did 
not change the military equation, but it had a huge psychological impact: 
"Stan really doesn't quite get Washington," a colleague says, "and he was a 
little bit embarrassed. He took a huge gulp. Before London he was on 
transmit, after that he wasn't."
Coming nearly on the heels of McChrystal's misstep, the Eikenberry "low-end" 
option made a huge difference, coalescing opposition to McChrystal's call 
for a high-end flood of more troops and a full-blown counter-insurgency 
campaign. "McChrystal's gaffe gave Eikenberry his opening and he took it," a 
well-placed senate staffer says.
Eikenberry's cable exploded like a bomb inside Obama's NSC and reinforced 
Biden's skepticism over McChrystal's plan and strengthened the voices that 
believed McChrystal's plan should be ratcheted back and that the US should 
be provided with an "off ramp" - a way out of the country if the plan didn't 
work. Eikenberry's meeting with Obama and the NSC team also cast broad doubt 
on whether what the US faced in Afghanistan was a full-blown insurgency: 
doubts that persist despite Obama's acceptance of an increase of 30,000 US 
troops. The voices of doubt have impressive credentials.
James Clad, a former Pentagon deputy assistant secretary of defense for 
South Asia, is one of the prominent doubters. "It's not clear to me that 
what we're facing in Afghanistan is a counter-insurgency," he says. "In 
fact, I'm quite sure it's not. It's more likely that it's a Pashtun civil 
war. Which means we're applying the wrong fix to the wrong kind of problem."
Clad finds himself agreeing with Graham Fuller, a former Central 
Intelligence Agency station chief in Kabul, who last week wrote that "the 
'objective' situation in Afghanistan remains a mess. We are not now winning 
hearts and minds in Afghanistan; indeed, we never can, and certainly not at 
gunpoint". Fuller continued by saying that "most Pashtuns will never accept 
a US plan for Afghanistan's future, [while] the non-Pashtuns - Tajiks, 
Uzbeks, Hazaras, etc - naturally welcome any outside support in what is a 
virtual civil war".
Clad sees the president's announcement as an unworkable compromise between 
contending Washington factions, each of which has a strongly militarized 
face. "More troops also mean more targets for a terrain-savvy enemy," he 
says, "and whatever the impending uptick in violence against the Taliban 
achieves," he says, "we will need to anchor the result in a regional 
settlement - one that draws Iran, China, Russia and India into a common 
purpose: to stop primitive Islamist zealots seizing Kabul once again, which 
is the Pakistani security establishment's preferred 'default' position. By 
militarizing the response to 9/11," Clad continues, "we took the view that 
America 'owns' Afghanistan in perpetuity, a foolish unilateral approach that 
the president's policy seems to endorse."
Andrew Bacevich, the dean of America's military thinkers, is even more 
outspoken. Writing in the Los Angeles Times in the immediate aftermath of 
the Obama decision, Bacevich likened Obama's decision to Bush's 
anti-terrorism crusade - a damning comparison.
Like Eikenberry - and Clad and Fuller, Bacevich questions whether launching 
a counter-insurgency campaign in Afghanistan is wise: "The 'surge' 
engineered by Army General David H Petraeus in Iraq enables proponents of 
that war to change the subject and to argue that the counter-insurgency 
techniques employed in Iraq can produce similar results in Afghanistan," 
Bacevich writes, "disregarding the fact that the two places bear about as 
much resemblance to one another as North Dakota does to Southern 
California."
He concludes: "Under the guise of cleaning up Bush's mess, Obama has chosen 
to continue Bush's policies. No doubt pulling the plug on an ill-advised 
enterprise involves risk and uncertainty. It also entails acknowledging 
mistakes. It requires courage. Yet without these things, talk of change will 
remain so much hot air."
Opponents of Obama's Afghanistan strategy argue that eight years after 9/11, 
America's response to terrorism (or "extremist violence" - to use the 
current president's stumbling catch phrase) remains chillingly 
unsophisticated: kill the enemy. While McChrystal's counter-insurgency plan 
was largely defanged, it was eventually endorsed by a president whose 
civilian team is short on military experience (neither Obama nor his 
secretary of state has ever served in uniform) and whose closest advisors - 
excepting Biden - were slow to question military assumptions. "We were 
really behind the curve," a senior State Department diplomat admits.
Critics of Obama might conclude from his recent West Point speech that the 
military is in charge of the American government - but don't tell the 
Pentagon. The military got what it wanted, but it emerged from the 
three-month Afghanistan review process with a keen sense of its limits and a 
strong feeling that while it might have succeeded in flooding the zone this 
time, it won't happen again.
(Copyright 2009 Mark Perry.)

 totale come Obama
metà degli americani in generale non è in grado di intendere e volere,
visto che vuole la botte piena e la moglie ubriaca. Di solito si
impara da ragazzi che non si possono avere entrambe, questi si sono
creati una famiglia e ancora ci credono...
While 80 percent of Republicans and 58 percent of independents say
they support sending more troops, just 11 percent and 12 percent,
respectively, say they would back a tax increase on all Americans to
fund the effort.

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ripensandoci questa apparente schizofrenia ha una ragione, ovvero che
ormai chi va in guerra è "selezionato" tra i più poveri, che sono gli
unici che devono rischiare la pelle per poter avere una minima
possibilità di carriera (o nell'esercito o studiano con borse di
studio pagate dall'esercito in cambio del servizio militare)per cui
c'è un 80% potenziale di intervistati che può approvare la guerra (e
le maggiori truppe) sapendo che tanto non saranno loro o i loro figli
a finire in Afghanistan. Mentre quello che li tocca direttamente è
pagare le tasse per mandare più soldati, e su quello, non a caso, sono
contrari.

 ha scritto nel messaggio 
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Eh, � sui tempi di applicazione della strategia che i cittadini sono meno 
d'accordo! Se leggi i dettagli lo vedi. 

contrari.
beh, da un punto di vista sociologico non hai tutti i torti. La classe media 
� quella che paga ma, generalmente, non fa pi� il servizio militare. E' 
anche vero per� che gli americani coltivano un patriottismo tutt'ora 
sconosciuto in Italia quindi non ci si deve stupire se non vogliono perdere 
la faccia. Sinceramente non mi sento affatto di biasimarli. In fin dei conti 
gli Usa hanno delle responsabilit� mondiali che vanno condotte 
dignitosamente ad una conclusione possibilmente positiva. 

creati una famiglia e ancora ci credono...
va beh, il tuo antiamericanismo � noto... :-) 

 wrote in message 
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#_Scrivi da cane; si vede che hai preso troppi ceffoni da papa`.
_I Terminators della NATO, dopo i 30'000 e passa rinforzi arrivati( o in 
arrivo), hanno gia`messo le mani avanti per difendersi da insuccessi 
(scontatissimi).
_Passata la richiesta di rinforzi, infatti,  l'ultima litan�a e` :
" Per il successo della nostra strategia, bisognerebbe riuscire a prendere 
o'Samma Bin Laden!!!" :)) 

 ormai chi va in guerra � "selezionato" tra i pi� poveri, che sono gli
Apparentemente quel che riporti � falso:
http://www.heritage.org/research/nationalsecurity/cda05-08.cfm
Questo invece per quanto riguarda la composizione etnica:
http://www.nationalpriorities.org/Racial+Composition+of+Army+Recruits+vs.+Population+2004
Ho come l'impressione che tu nn ti intenda del reclutamento nelle FF.AA. 
USA..
MGOK

 Apparentemente quel che riporti falso:
apparentemente in tutto il parlamento yankee c'è UN solo parlamentare
con il figlio al fronte. Apparentemente i furbetti del quartierino
parlano dell'esercito in generale, senza specificare a che titolo ci
stanno le reclute. Insomma, lì non c'è una riga che differenzia chi va
in Iraq da chi non lo fa (e la differenza conta, perchè è noto che le
missioni vnegono pagate di più). Me ne sbatto la ciolla se il figlio
del ricco fa un servizio militare stile Bush jr, che non mise piede in
Vietnam....

 d'accordo! Se leggi i dettagli lo vedi.
Ah, ora ho visto. Comunque un po' di tempo in più male non fa... ;-)

 #_Scrivi da cane;
Quando scrivi non si capisce un cazzo, Giano. Fare lo spiaggiato
rincoglionito non giova alla tua comprensibilità.

o'Samma Bin Laden!!!" :))
Quando scrivi non si capisce un cazzo, Giano.
#_Fattelo spiegare da babbo...Io da quaggiu`non ci arrivo colle spiegazioni! 

 Apparentemente i furbetti del quartierino
parlano dell'esercito in generale, senza specificare a che titolo ci
stanno le reclute. Insomma, l� non c'� una riga che differenzia chi va
in Iraq da chi non lo fa (e la differenza conta, perch� � noto che le
missioni vnegono pagate di pi�). Me ne sbatto la ciolla se il figlio
del ricco fa un servizio militare stile Bush jr, che non mise piede in
Vietnam....
Quindi tu hai delle statistiche sui redditi delle famiglie di provenienza 
dei militari USA schierati in Irak e Afghanistan, separate da quelle delle 
famiglie dei militari USA in generale? 

 arrivo),
C'� una certa differenza tra arrivati e in arrivo.

Io non ci arrivo colle spiegazioni!
Lo so Giano, non a caso sei rincoglionito.

 culo
#_Si vede che lo schiaffeggio dev'essere la Vs. tradizione di famiglia...