Is Afghanistan the key?
Ahmed Rashid, one of the world's leading experts on Afghanistan, has written a in the Daily Telegraph in the UK saying that George Bush and Tony Blair have been distracted by Iraq and lost focus on Afghanistan.
It comes a day after an accident with a US military convoy in Kabul . Mr Rashid is going to join the programme to talk about why the international community needs to refocus its efforts on Afghanistan.
The agenda may be set, but we felt like with the increasing violence, we needed to hear voices out of Afghanistan and let you, our listeners discuss the issues.
Mr Rashid also wrote a piece for the 91Èȱ¬ News website:
Why - five years after the Taleban and al-Qaeda were smashed by US forces - is Afghanistan facing a resurgent Taleban movement that is now threatening to overwhelm it?
Several people have left comments on the story. Here are a just a few:
Nausherwan Lahori, Lahore, Pakistan:
If only the US had concentrated on securing Afghanistan instead of starting an illegal and useless war in Iraq, things would have been so much better today.
And John Thibault, Afghanistan (civilian contractor) had this to say:
I had been to both Iraqi and Afghan theatres. It was incredibly obvious how much funding the Iraq war has been given in contrast to Afghanistan. I was expecting to see a country nearly rebuilt after almost five years. I think this article hits a lot of points. I would like to see some changes made and Afghanistan recover.
We've already booked several callers from Afghanistan and Pakistan as well as a few from the US and Canada. We're going to be joined by a representative from , a US group of former soldiers who support the global war on terror. They believe that the support for the war and what they fought for both in Iraq and Afghanistan is being undermined by what co-founder Owen West called "chaotic leadership". He faults both parties.
One party is overly sanguine, unwilling to acknowledge its errors. The other is overly maudlin, unable to forgive the same. The Bush administration seeks to insulate the public from the reality of war, placing its burden on the few. The press has tried to fill that gap by exposing the raw brutality of the insurgency; but it has often done so without context, leaving a clear implication that we can never win.
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