Progress Toward Armageddon

The Obama administration plans to further step up attacks on Al Qaeda and Taliban insurgents in the tribal areas of Pakistan, to address one of the fundamental weaknesses uncovered in its year-end review of its Afghanistan war strategy.

Administration officials said the increased attacks across the Afghan border would help offset the Pakistani government’s continued refusal to move against the Qaeda leadership and their extremist allies.

[...]

The United States, [Obama] said, “will continue to insist to Pakistani leaders that terrorist safe havens within their borders must be dealt with.”

Administration officials said they expected the Pakistani military to finally enter North Waziristan in 2011, based on private assurances from the Pakistani government.

But the real strategy appears to be for the United States to do most of the work itself — at least until the Pakistanis step up.

[...]

The drone strikes in Pakistan have already risen significantly over the past year. The Central Intelligence Agency carried out roughly 53 Predator attacks in 2009, which was more than President George W. Bush authorized during his entire presidency. The figure has more than doubled this year, though presidential aides will not publicly discuss the program because it is technically secret.

  NYT

The ever-spreading insurgency in Afghanistan, which now controls or has strong footholds even in northern regions which the Taliban never controlled before the war, is not, as you might think, a glaring indication of the catastrophic failure of the militarist agenda; on the contrary, it is, Obama says, a sign of "significant progress." This has been the argument of our bipartisan militarists since the very beginning, in Afghanistan and Iraq: any problems in our violent occupations of these foreign lands is caused by enemy action -- and all enemy actions, including the control of more and more territory, can be defined as evidence of progress. The very success of the enemy, the fierceness of their resistance, is evidence of their desperation, their ultimate and imminent collapse.

[...]

In other words, American policy in Afghanistan is failing so badly that Obama is about to engulf a volatile, unstable, nuclear-armed nation [Pakistan] in a vast, divisive, violent upheaval led by an utterly corrupt and unpopular government. The result will be the deaths of thousands upon thousands of innocent people, the displacement of millions more -- in a land still reeling from one of the worst natural disasters the world has seen in modern times -- and, of course, the spread of extremism, hatred, instability and chaos.

  Chris Floyd

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.