One year ago, I asked whether then President-elect Barack Obama's plans for Afghanistan still made sense after the Mumbai attacks torpedoed hopes of a regional settlement involving Pakistan and India. The argument, much touted during Obama's election campaign, was that a peace deal with India would convince Pakistan to turn decisively on Islamist militants, thereby bolstering the United States flagging campaign in Afghanistan.

As I wrote at the time, it had always been an ambitious plan to convince India and Pakistan to put behind them 60 years of bitter struggle over Kashmir as part of a regional solution to many complex problems in Afghanistan.  Had the Mumbai attacks pushed it out of reach? And if so, what was the fall-back plan?

One year on, there is as yet still no sign of a fall-back plan for Afghanistan and the tense relationship between India and Pakistan remains the elusive piece of the jigsaw.

After some attempts at peace-making which culminated in a meeting between the leaders of India and Pakistan in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt in July, and despite Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's own determination to try to repair relations, the two countries have descended into mutual recrimination.

India accuses Pakistan of failing to take enough action against the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group it blames for Mumbai and which analysts believe is still in a position to launch fresh attacks, and refuses to reopen formal peace talks broken off after the three-day assault. Pakistan has put seven men on trial over the attacks but has refused to arrest the group's founder Hafiz Saeed nor, analysts say, to dismantle the infrastructure of an organisation whose original role was to fight India in Kashmir. It says it wants to resume talks with India.

As a result of the deadlock, both countries remain bitter rivals for influence in Afghanistan; while Pakistan, fighting its own battle against Islamist militants who have turned against the state, is seen as reluctant to move more troops from its eastern border with India to press home a military campaign against the Pakistani Taliban in its tribal areas. India in turn remains vulnerable to another Mumbai-style attack which could trigger Indian retaliation against Pakistan, running a risk of escalation between the two nuclear-armed countries.

"Now India and Pakistan are both playing for broke. Pakistan says it will support a U.S. regional strategy that does not include India, while India is talking about a regional alliance with Iran and Russia that excludes Pakistan. Both positions -- throwbacks to the 1990s, when neighboring states fuelled opposing sides in Afghanistan's civil war -- are non-starters as far as helping the U.S.-NATO alliance bring peace to Afghanistan," writes Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid in the Washington Post.

"To avoid a regional debacle and the Taliban gaining even more ground, Obama needs to fulfil the commitment he made to Afghanistan in March: to send more troops -- so that U.S.-NATO forces and the Afghan government can regain the military initiative -- as well as civilian experts, and more funds for development. He must bring both India and Pakistan on board and help reduce their differences; a regional strategy is necessary for any U.S. strategy in Afghanistan to have a chance. The United States needs to persuade India to be more flexible toward Pakistan while convincing Pakistanis to match such flexibility in a step-by-step process that reduces terrorist groups operating from its soil so that the two archenemies can rebuild a modicum of trust. "

Obama and the U.S. administration are being very careful to avoid being seen as trying to mediate between India and Pakistan -- India is sensitive about outside interference, particularly over Kashmir, which it sees as a bilateral dispute.

But in reality, the United States has been involved in easing tensions in every recent crisis between the two countries -- from the 1999 Kargil war when India and Pakistan fought a brief but intense conflict along the Line of Control dividing the disputed former kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir, to a military standoff in 2001/2002 when close to a million men were mobilised along the border after an attack on the Indian parliament. Following the attack on Mumbai, it was to the United States that India turned to to put pressure on Pakistan to crack down on the Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Will Obama be able to find a way forward to ease tensions between India and Pakistan, in turn creating a firmer regional foundation to stabilise Afghanistan? Or more precisely, is there a method to his initiatives over the last few months involving not just India and Pakistan, but also China, that in the fullness of time will be seen to be part of an overall strategy to drive a regional bargain that will underpin his plans for Afghanistan?

As discussed in this analysis, the United States faced a difficult balancing act in its relations with India, Pakistan and China.  The financial crisis had made it more economically dependent on China, while its need for support in Afghanistan made it more militarily dependent on Pakistan.

India, which was defeated in a border war with China in 1962, has always been suspicious of Beijing's role as one of Pakistan's closest allies. And since Obama's election it also became wary of what it feared was a U.S. tilt towards China which might undermine burgeoning U.S.-India ties which flourished under his predecessor George W. Bush.

The United States has tried to navigate its way through these competing rivalries by promising aid and support to Pakistan, while also inviting Indian prime minister Singh to make the first state visit of his presidency. During a visit by Obama to China, the two countries promised to work together to promote peace in South Asia. Analysts variously interpreted the pledge as unwarranted interference between India and Pakistan, a detail in a lengthy statement about U.S.-Chinese relations, and a sign that China might encourage Pakistan to crack down on Islamist militants in ways that would also reassure India. (As yet, the jury is still out on which interpretation is correct.)

When Obama unveils his latest plans for Afghanistan next week, we might get some clues as to whether he has used the long delay in announcing his strategy to build regional support for a grand bargain on Afghanistan.  Failing that, we might get an answer to the question I asked a year ago. What is the fall-back plan?

(Photos: The Taj hotel during the Mumbai attacks, the Dal lake in Kashmir; artillery at Drass on the Line of Control; the Obamas ahead of the state dinner for Prime Minister Singh)

If President Barack Obama opts to increase the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan next week, the decision could be underscored by something a bit unusual for his policies: growing U.S. public support. 
    
Polling data have shown for a while now that most Americans don't favor many of Obama's policy positions, despite his enduring personal popularity.
    
A USA Today/Gallup poll depicts Obama battling headwinds on a number of fronts: Americans oppose the closing of Gitmo by more than a 2-to-1 margin; those against healthcare reform edge out those in favor by 5 percentage points; and most don't want accused Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed tried in civilian court in New York City.
    
Afghanistan is no cakewalk, either. Public opinion is divided over the question of more troops and 55 percent of Americans disapprove of the president's handling of the war up to now -- a reversal of his 56 percent approval rating four months ago.
    
But the polling data, compiled Nov. 20-22, might also suggest a silver lining for the president as he nears an announcement that could send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan.
    
Less than half of Americans -- 47 percent -- favor a troop increase. But that's up from 42 percent in a Nov. 5-8 survey.
    
Plus, the opposition is down: 39 percent of Americans now want the president to reduce the U.S. military footprint, vs. 44 percent earlier.
    
What hasn't changed for Obama is that Republicans, not fellow Democrats, are his best buddies when it comes to increasing troops. Seventy-two percent of Republicans back a bigger U.S. force in Afghanistan, while 57 percent of Democrats say it's time to start pulling out.     

That could be important for Obama's agenda in Congress as the 2010 election approaches and Democratic incumbents in tight races consider how they might fare with Democratic voters.

The USA Today/Gallup findings are based on telephone interviews with 1,017 adults. The margin of error is 4 percentage points.

Photo credits: Reuters/Jason Reed (Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates); Reuters/Mathieu Belanger (U.S. soldier departs for Afghanistan); Reuters/Lucas Jackson (NYC crowd watches Obama)

Kabul-based, Afghani photographer Ahmad Masood, is spending a month based in Berlin.

On my first day of work in Berlin: a very different city from my city, Kabul, Afghanistan, I covered a demonstration by students demanding improved conditions at schools and universities. I have covered some hardcore protests in Afghanistan, where about 8 out of 10 resulted in death or serious injuries. This time I was in Germany and I didn’t expect any violence.

We arrived at the scene. There were many young men and women gathered with banners and some armed with whistles in their mouths. People were laughing and smiling. There was music playing on a loud speaker.  If that was not enough, some protesters were blowing their own trumpets and other instruments. It was just like a party. The students looked to be in pretty good condition, so I was wondering “Why? What are you complaining about?”.

The police were quiet and peaceful, kindly giving way to the marching, bustling and whistling demonstrators. To my surprise the police stopped me from taking their pictures.

So, before it began it finished and the only serious issues were as follows: police confiscated a banner which was not allowed, there was a colored flare fired and a couple of water balloons were thrown at the very well-behaved police.

I filed only three pictures to the wire, two of which were of the same person who was the only person I found in any way similar to an Afghan protester.

I could not help but to compare the two countries, Afghanistan and Germany, and the way they protest.

War and conflict impacts people everywhere and in my country it has been going on for nearly three decades with no sign of ending. People are too busy trying to make ends meet to protest for their rights. For the majority, to waste a day would mean no food for their children at home. Any demonstration in Afghanistan stems from extremely real rage.

This rage takes its toll on Afghanistan. Afghan police are interested in having their pictures taken, that is until they start beating up protesters, and at times journalists too.

Police are often not well trained and at some points they fire directly at the protesters instead of firing warning shots. Protesters, too, make a mess of the place by burning and destroying public property out of anger. When a protest erupts; clashes start, guns are drawn, shots are fired, rocks are flying.

In Afghanistan, it is always a protest of necessity not of choice.

Why is passing healthcare reform so difficult? A big reason is that Democrats are trying to pay for a broad-based new entitlement without enacting a broad-based new tax. As the joke goes, the only real difference between Republicans and Democrats is that the Rs don't want to raise taxes on anybody and the Ds want to clip only the top 2 percent.

But some Democrats have finally found a cause worth taxing the middle class for: the war in Afghanistan. A group of powerful House committee chairmen are pushing a graduated
income surtax. (A Senate effort would tax only the wealthy.)

The twin goals, backers say, are fiscal probity and transparency, especially now that it looks like President Barack Obama will be sending up to $34 billion worth of new troops to Afghanistan. As Barney Frank, House Financial Services chairman, puts it: "It's important for people to understand how these wars are adding to our deficits."

Nonsense. The same lawmakers supporting the war surtax also support a healthcare reform plan that is structured to hide long-term costs. No accounting trick is spared. Taxes are front loaded. Some spending is back loaded, while other spending is shunted to a separate bill.

No, the goal of the surtax is to drain public support for a war many Democrats think should be downgraded. And no doubt if this legislative effort proves successful, it would be tempting to eventually make the temporary surtax permanent.

Indeed, the whole effort could be laying the groundwork for a broad value-added tax that many centrist and liberal economists think necessary to shrink America's long-term budget gap.

But why not take this opportunity to help pay for the war through spending cuts? It's inside-the-Beltway wisdom that Congress won't cut spending. But eventually spending will need trimming to deal with the long-term budget deficit without resorting to currency devaluation or inflation or huge tax increases.

Time for Congress to prove the common wisdom wrong and do the unexpected: Cut spending.

Why is passing healthcare reform so difficult? One big reason is that Democrats are trying to pay for a broad-based new entitlement without enacting a broad-based new tax.

As the joke goes, the only real difference between Republicans and Democrats is that the Rs don't want to raise taxes on anybody and the Ds want to clip only the top 2 percent.

But some Democrats have finally found a cause worth taxing the middle class for: the war in Afghanistan. A group of powerful House committee chairmen are pushing a graduated income surtax. (A Senate effort would tax only the wealthy.)

The twin goals, backers say, are fiscal probity and transparency, especially now that it looks like President Barack Obama will be sending up to $34 billion worth of new troops to Afghanistan.

As Barney Frank, House Financial Services chairman, puts it: 'It's important for people to understand how these wars are adding to our deficits.'

Nonsense. The same lawmakers supporting the war surtax also support a healthcare reform plan that is structured to hide long-term costs. No accounting trick is spared. Taxes are front loaded. Some spending is back loaded, while other spending is shunted to a separate bill.

No, the goal of the surtax is to drain public support for a war many Democrats think should be downgraded. And no doubt if this legislative effort proves successful, it would be tempting to eventually make the temporary surtax permanent.

Indeed, the whole effort could be laying the groundwork for a broad value-added tax that many centrist and liberal economists think necessary to shrink America's long-term budget gap.

But why not take this opportunity to help pay for the war through spending cuts?

It's inside-the-Beltway wisdom that Congress won't cut spending. But eventually spending will need trimming to deal with the long-term budget deficit without resorting to currency devaluation or inflation or huge tax increases.

So let's start now. The war in Afghanistan currently costs some $43 billion a year. As the Heritage Foundation rightly notes, "that sum is dwarfed by the $72 billion in improper payments (i.e. over-payments, payments made for services and goods never received, benefits and tax credits paid to people who didn’t qualify) that the Government Accounting Office said the federal government made last year." Then there's $92 billion in corporate welfare and $123 billion in programs that simply aren't really showing any positive impact, according to government auditors.

Time for Congress to prove the common wisdom wrong and do the unexpected: Cut spending.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is in the United States for the first official state visit by any foreign leader since President Barack Obama took office this year. While the atmospherics are right, and the two leaders probably won't be looking as stilted as Obama and China's President Hu Jintao appeared to be during Obama's trip last week (for the Indians are rarely short on conversation), there is a sense of unease.

And much of it has to do with AFPAK - the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan which is very nearly at the top of Obama's foreign policy agenda and one that some fear may eventually consume the rest of his presidency. America's ally Pakistan worries about India's expanding assistance and links to Afghanistan, seeing it as part of a strategy to encircle it from the rear.  Ordinarily, Pakistani noises wouldn't bother India as much, but for signs that the Obama administration has begun to adopt those concerns as its own in its desperate search for a solution, as Fareed Zakaria writes in Newsweek.

And that is producing a "perverse view" of the region, he says adding it was a bit strange that India was being criticised for its influence in Afghanistan. India is the hegemon in South Asia, with a GDP 100 times that of Afghanistan and it was only natural that as Afghanistan opened itself up following the ouster of the Taliban in 2001, its cuisine, movies and money would flow into the country. The whole criticism about India,  Zakaria says, is a little bit like saying the United States has had growing influence  in Mexico over the last few decades and should be penalised for it.

But what about Pakistan's concerns, a country that was dismembered in the last full-scale war with India in 1971 with the creation of Bangladesh. The last thing it would want is a hostile regime in Afghanistan on its western flank on top of the Indian army, the world's third largest, massed on the eastern front, not to mention the Islamist militants whom it once nurtured turning on  the State itself.

Pakistan army chief General Ashfaq Kayani told the U.S. National Security Adviser General Jim Jones earlier his month that Indian presence in Kabul would hurt the war objectives.

And what about the Afghans themselves ? The India-Pakistan rivalry is probably a sideshow in the broader battle between a resurgent Taliban and the foreign forces, but perhaps one they can do without.

[Photographs of Afghan children and Indian and U.S. flags at the White House]

The United Nations said last week that Afghanistan is "without doubt" the worst place in the world for a child, especially a girl, to be born.

It has the highest infant mortality rate in the world, 70 percent of Afghans have no access to clean water and hundreds of schools, mostly girls' schools, have been attacked by Taliban or other insurgents.

Unfortunately the finding in UNICEF's annual report on children comes as no surprise to people who live in the impoverished, war-torn country.

For many Afghans and foreigners in Afghanistan who are not living on the breadline, the little boys and girls in grubby clothes and dirty faces, who tap on their car windows, begging them for money or desperately trying to sell tattered maps and chewing gum, are a bit of a pest. They are such a familiar part of Afghanistan's crumbling urban landscape that they go unnoticed or at best are actively avoided by wealthier passersby.

Throughout Afghanistan, children are very visible and are perhaps the most photographed entity in the country after foreign troops. In rural areas they stand outside doorways in clusters, greet foreign military convoys cheerily, crowd around foreigners and walk around bare footed, with matted hair.

They are part of a generation who have so far grown-up only knowing Washington and NATO's military involvement in their country. Although they have been spared the experience of Afghanistan's brutal civil war of the early 1990s and the reign of the Taliban, they are now at risk of being killed in foreign forces air strikes, suicide attacks and insurgent-laid roadside bombs.

Girls, despite being allowed back to school, have it particularly bad, the UNICEF report says. Again, given Afghanistan's recent history of subjugating women and keeping them economically and socially disenfranchised, this also comes as no shock. 

They are married-off young in rural areas, are barely educated outside provincial capitals and those that do go to school are often made to feel miserable for daring to try to improve their lives.

And some girls in the Shia community face the prospect of having a husband who may legally be able to subject them to marital rape.

But there are also powerful and strong examples of young people prospering. The recent election saw thousands of teenagers volunteering to support the process, enthusiastically helping election staff at polling stations. The results of the fraud-ridden poll however probably jilted their optimism and undermined their expectations of change.

Many young Afghans are determined to do well and try to find the bright side in the conflict that has derailed their upbringings, by seeking-out opportunities where they can change Afghanistan for the better. Some of those who have been educated in neighbouring Iran or Pakistan when their families fled fighting and the Taliban before 2001 have returned to their birth country and are now active in human rights and democracy movements and are accomplished advocates for peace and change, hoping they can help improve things so their younger compatriots can have a better life.

[Top: Afghan girls carry water in Kabul (Reuters/Ahmed Masood); middle: displaced Afghan children in Helmand province (Reuters/Omar Sobhani); a mourner touches the body of a boy residents said was killed by U.S.-led troops in Kabul in September 2008 (Reuters/Omar Sobhani)]

In his inauguration speech on Thursday, Afghan president Hamid Karzai promised to combat corruption and appoint competent ministers, heading off the growing chorus of criticism from the West that his government is crooked and inept. Unsurprisingly, the Western dignitaries in the audience declared that they liked what they heard.

We predicted ahead of time that we would hear positive words about Karzai this week. After all, Western governments need to convince their own voters back home that the veteran Afghan leader’s government is worth sending their sons and daughters to die for. This autumn’s election debacle made Karzai look bad – a U.N.-backed probe found that nearly a third of votes cast for him were fake -- but now that’s all over and the West needs him to look as reliable as possible.

A “very strong, substantial statement,” declared British Foreign Secretary David Miliband.

"An important new starting point" that “set forth an agenda for change and reform” gushed U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“Let’s encourage and support the president,” said EU envoy Ettore Sequi.

Well, that’s what they said when the cameras were rolling. Behind the scenes the message was: Karzai’s speech was fine, but it’s just a speech.

“We’ve heard all of these sentiments before. If you compare his last inauguration to this inauguration, you’ll see there’s almost a 90 percent overlap,” was how one Western official in Kabul put it.

President Barack Obama, who is still considering whether to send tens of thousands of extra troops to join the 68,000 Americans and 40,000 NATO allies in Afghanistan, has a hard sell to his own Democratic party. If the inauguration means it is now time to be nice to Karzai, nobody told Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat speaker of the House of Representatives. She let Karzai have it with both barrels.

“The president of Afghanistan has proven to be an unworthy partner,” she told NPR’s Morning Edition. “How can we ask the American people to pay a big price in lives and limbs and also in dollars if we don’t have a connection to reliable partner?”

[Above: Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai inspects the guard of honour on his arrival at the presidential palace for his inauguration in Kabul November 19, 2009. REUTERS/Jerry Lampen]

-- This opinion piece was written by C.M. Sennot for GlobalPost. The views expressed are his own. It was originally published here on GlobalPost. --

The last time America had to borrow money to finance a war was during the Revolution and a cash-strapped Continental Congress took loans from France to fund a surge against the British.

That worked out pretty well.

But it’s hard to feel the spirit of 1776 in President Obama’s journey to China. He went as a representative of a borrowing nation to its primary lender amid a call for yet another costly military surge in the Long War that is escalating in Afghanistan even if it is hopefully winding down in Iraq.

As the president completes his journey to Asia, he returns to Washington to face what is the most consequential foreign policy decision of his presidency, a decision that this administration has not yet fully thought through.

That is whether to heed the counsel of his top commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, and call for a surge of 40,000 more troops in Afghanistan.

Obama is said to also be pondering a middle ground of calling up somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 more troops.

Or, and this is shaping up as a long shot, he and his team of rivals in the Pentagon and the State Department could decide to rebuff McChrystal. In this scenario, Obama would refocus the mission but still hold to the general counterinsurgency plan that he originally spelled out in March and which increased U.S. troops by 21,000 to a total U.S. presence of 68,000 troops. That surge was just completed this fall.

From my experience talking with counterinsurgency experts and meeting with U.S. and coalition counterinsurgency leaders and trainers in Afghanistan over the summer, I am hoping Obama chooses to hold to the existing troops level. I am hoping he does that while refocusing his original plan to be more targeted on counterterrorism than the wider goal of classic counterinsurgency against the Taliban. He should stick to his guns and hold at the troop levels he has and make the troops who are there better and more effective and provided with better equipment and intelligence assets to get the job done. As I said in an earlier column, less is more right now in Afghanistan.

Every empire in history has regretted an escalation in Afghanistan and it is hard to see how America would be any different.

I do not envy the president and his team in making a very difficult and costly decision at a very hard time economically in America. Few presidents in history have had to face so many fateful decisions in their first year in the White House.

But despite all the pondering the president has given to whether to increase troops, it seems he has given far too little consideration to the overall cost of escalating the war and how it will undercut his ability to fund the ambitious domestic policy agenda he has set out from bank bailouts to health care reform.

With all the debt piling up, it seems to me there is a clear connection between his trip to China and these war costs in Afghanistan.

If you think about it, the hundreds of billions we borrow from China every year will go at least in part to fund the enormous cost of an escalation of troops in Afghanistan, a cost — in terms of lives and treasure.

The war in Iraq will end up costing this country more than 2 trillion dollars, according to the conservative projections of Linda Bilmes, an economist at the Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. The cost is higher still if you include interest on the debt, interest which will in a large measure be paid to China.

Bilmes has worked closely with the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz to do the long math on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to factor in not just the military budget and the interest on the debt but also the extraordinary high cost on every level of soldiers who are wounded physically and mentally by war.

Bilmes is credited with highlighting the failure of the administration of President George W. Bush to give an accurate cost assessment of a war that escalated several hundred times beyond the original projection of just $50 billion to $60 billion made by the Pentagon at the start of the war in 2003. She’s been proven right and she’s worried that the Obama administration may be fatefully making another miscalculation on the cost of war in Afghanistan.

And we’ve hit a profound turning point in Afghanistan. In this new budget year, which started Oct. 1, for the first time, the war in Afghanistan will cost Americans more than the war in Iraq.

And, as Bilmes points out, fighting in Afghanistan is more costly than it is in Iraq because of the terrain and the difficulty in supplying troops and evacuating the wounded. She estimates that Afghanistan is as much as 1.6 times more expensive per soldier than Iraq.

“While this administration has brought great military expertise to thinking this through, there needs to be a greater focus on the cost. How are we going to pay for this? People are still not looking at the long term costs,” said Bilmes.

And so as the president stares out the window of Air Force One pondering the dark skies in the long journey back to Washington, one can only hope that he has thought through the extraordinary cost — on every level — of calling for an escalation of troops in Afghanistan.

More on Afghanistan from GlobalPost:

America's farmer-soldiers in Afghanistan

Afghanistan's only pig quarantined? Must be bad

Afghanistan: Waiting for the dust to settle

Troops' deaths shatter trust in Helmand

Pictured above: U.S. President Barack Obama tours the Great Wall of China at Badaling, November 18, 2009. REUTERS/Jason Reed