Obama to announce Afghan plans Wednesday - Karen DeYoung and Scott Wilson

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/checkpoint-washington/post/obama-to-announce-afghan-plans-wednesday/2011/06/20/AG4JAIdH_blog.html

Obama has been under conflicting pressure on the pace of troop withdrawals from his own advisers, some of whom believe that the the broad civil-military campaign in Afghanistan has overreached, and argued that the killing last month of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan has greatly weakened al Qaeda.

I believe that we should be withdrawing, but I think the notion that bin Laden's death has weakened anything is ludicrous. Al Qaeda is not an organization in the sense that we hold, it's more of a philosophy. Even if we stamped out bin Laden's organization, even if we killed every jihadist in Afghanistan, the bombers that have hit the West over the last four years were from the West.

And that's just the point: what do we hope to hope to accomplish? If it's curbing terrorism, we have chosen an extremely inefficient way to do it. If it's rebuilding a nation, let's choose one that will offer us some benefit. China is spending what we are spending in Afghanistan, only they are building infrastructure to extract natural resources in countries like Chile that will actually benefit them five years from now.