Much of the rationale for the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan has to do with making sure that it doesn't become a haven for militant groups once again. As President Barack Obama weighs U.S. and NATO commander General Stanley McChrystal's recommendation for 40,000 more troops at a time of fading public support for the war in Afghanistan, some people are questioning the basic premise that America must remain militarily committed there so that al Qaeda doesn't creep back under the protection of the Taliban.

Richard N.Haass, the president of the Council for Foreign Relations, kicked off the debate this month, arguing that al Qaeda didn't really "require Afghan real estate to constitute a regional or global threat". Terrorists head to areas of least resistance, and if it is not Afghanistan, they will choose other unstable countries such as Somalia or Yemen, if it hasn't  happened already, he argues. And the United States cannot conceivably secure all the terrorist havens in the world.

Some experts argue that physical space isn't really the key to militant groups survival anymore in the age of the Internet. Paul R Pillar, a former CIA counterterrorism official, said in a piece for the Washington Post that safe havens were usually used by militants to hold basic training for recruits. The operations most important to future terrorist attacks do not require such a home, and he cites the Sept 11, 2001 attacks as an example. "The preparations most important to the attacks took place not in camps in Afghanistan but, rather, in apartments in Germany, hotel rooms in Spain and flight schools in the United States," he says.

In the past couple of decades, international terrorist groups have thrived by exploiting globalization and information technology, which has lessened their dependence on physical havens. it's not that a sanctuary such as Afghanistan will not help al Qaeda; or other militant groups; the issue is whether denying them the space will prevent an attack, and that, Pillar says, is no longer guaranteed.

But Jim Arkedis, director of the National Security Project at the Progressive Policy Institute and a former Pentagon counter-terrorism official,  argues that the value of physical space cannot be underestimated and that a "homeless al Qaeda is the best guarantee against large-scale attacks."

It is certainly true that militants can accomplish much online, he concedes in a piece for Foreign Policy. Individuals can maintain contact with groups via chat rooms, money can be transferred over the Web (if done with extreme caution), and plotters can download items like instruction manuals for bomb-making, photographs of potential targets, and even blueprints for particular buildings.

But all the e-mail accounts, chat rooms, and social media available will never account for the human touch. "There is simply no substitute for the trust and confidence built by physically meeting, jointly conceiving, and then training together for a large-scale, complex operation on the other side of the world," Arkedis, who spent the last five years studying terrorist plots, says.

Even in the Sept 11 attack there were preparations that took place along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed put future operatives through a series of training courses. These included physical fitness, firearms, close combat, Western culture and English language.

You can learn lots of things online, but it is still preferable to have a dedicated professor physically present to supervise students and monitor progress, he says.

[Reuters photos of a U.S. Marine in Helmand and a woman  walking past a protest in Kabul]

On a hilltop in central Kabul, the relics of Soviet armoured vehicles sit in the shadow of an incongruously vast and empty swimming pool. A tower of diving boards looks down into the concrete carcass built by the Russians. Boys play football there and on Fridays the basin is used for dog fights; combat is the only option for the canine gladiators, as they cannot climb up the sheer, steep sides. From the vantage point you can see the city's graveyards, its bright new mosques, the narco-palaces of drug-funded business potentates and the spread of modest brick homes where most Kabulis live. It's a favourite spot for reporters when they need to escape the press of urgent events and get cleaner air in their lungs. 

For years journalists have sought to tell stories that go beyond the conflict in Afghanistan. We've tried to portray this country - the crossroads of central Asia, the summer home of Moghul emperors, the cockpit of clashing empires - as more than a place of blood, deprivation and extremism. Amid the dust and the heat it has its oases of tranquility, its laughter and its charms. From the market stalls of sweet pomengranates that line the road in autumn to the rose gardens newly planted in central Kabul, Afghanistan is a place of thorny history, cultural complexity and spartan beauty.

Alas, we cannot ignore the warfare. Great journalistic energy has to go into counting the casualties, explaining the violence and charting the shifting strategies of the combatants. It's a conflict whose outcome is uncertain. The bullets and bombs tear through the flesh of ordinary Afghans, fanatical insurgents and Western soldiers with equal awfulness. A blast takes the life of a child, deprives a wife of a husband and faintly furthers some cause. The impact is immediate and local, but it reverberates harshly in Washington, Delhi, London or Paris.

Can we weave together the warp of war and the weft of daily life in Afghanistan? Yes, in this blog, we hope is the answer. In the tradition of the region's richly patterned carpets, it will be both intricate and stoutly structured, minutely detailed and expansive in scale.

It will gather the impressions, observations and thoughts of our correspondents, video journalists and photographers in Afghanistan, whether they be in Kabul, on embedded assignments with different military units or travelling independently. Infrequent visitors like myself, just returned from Kabul, will contribute. I went to assess the mood, interview officials and see how our large journalistic operation is run. The blog will link our teams in Washington, London, Brussels, Delhi and Islamabad, bringing to bear a unique array of perspectives on the Afghan story.

It should be an intelligent, lively and useful addition to the words, images and video that Reuters already produces to illustrate this dynamic, significant and absorbing story. The blog won't be complete without your views. Please contribute your comments and become part of the debate on the future of Afghanistan. Be partisan if you wish, but kindly remain pleasant.

Welcome to 'The Afghan Journal.'

[Reuters pictures of diving boards at an empty Kabul swimming pool,a girl on a street and soldiers passing by another ]

An atmosphere of stale defensiveness has sunk over Kabul. The mood has been lowered by the protracted saga of the Afghan election count, almost two months on from the first round August 20 vote. It’s a drama veering towards farce more often than post-modern play, as we wait endlessly for a result, that like Godot, does not want to come.

Winter has not yet arrived in Kabul, though the evenings are cold, quickly taking the heat of the sun out of the day. Afghan politicians are frustrated and twitchy, second-guessing the reasons for the U.N.-backed election watchdog’s plodding. We are being solidly methodological to retain the confidence of all, says the Electoral Complaints Commission, as it examines thousands of dodgy votes. A thankless task, most likely. The ECC officials will be puzzling over whether a box of votes has been mass-endorsed for one candidate, and should not stand, or if the suspiciously similar ticks on the ballot paper are attributable to only one man in the village knowing how to write. Many of the rural voters will never have held a pen in their hand, argued one official. It is natural in such a tribal society for the village to establish a consensus on who to support. Do such ballot papers count? Remember Florida, and how ‘hanging chads’ and the U.S. Supreme Court gave George W. Bush the presidency over Al Gore? It’s that kind of agony.

Behind the scenes the whispers are that hesitation and delay are because the outcome is excruciatingly close, too close to call. President Hamid Karzai, once set clear for victory, may find first round success ripped from his grasp by the disqualification of votes stuffed into ballot boxes by his supporters. He’ll likely win a second round, if it happens, against his former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah; but there will have been a loss of dignity, of self-confidence and of an opportunity to stabilise Afghanistan and get on with fighting the Taliban.

Other more fraught scenarios are possible, as outlined by my colleague. Would Karzai gamble that the West has no alternative to him in Afghanistan? And that he can therefore afford to ignore the opprobrium that would follow if he rejected an outcome he did not like? Or are the suspicions of chicanery, back-room pressure on election officials and string-pulling by all involved just a proliferation of nonsense to fill the void left by the lack of a clear outcome?

Eventually the result will be out, perhaps by the time some of you get round to reading this. Most likely I will be back in London, watching from afar. Optimists would have it that clarity will clear the air, the Afghan political mood will lighten and spoils to all will come from the haggling over the shape of the next government.

Meanwhile Afghanistan is Limbo-stan. Obama won’t decide his strategy on Afghanistan until he sees what kind of Afghan partner he has to deal with. At least until then, and possibly longer, he won’t say yes or no to the extra troops that General Stanley McChrystal says he needs to carry out the counter-insurgency strategy that he has prepared. (Though he’ll carry out a different strategy, with no or fewer extra troops, if that’s what he’s ordered to do by his commander-in-chief). So in this limbo - the Washington policy void is filled with echo-chamber exhortations across the political divides; the Taliban is emboldened; Afghanistan’s neighbours are positioning themselves to benefit or at least guard against strategic loss should Washington fold its tent; and Western publics are wondering if there is a real purpose to their boys getting their limbs blown off while trudging through the fields of southern Helmand.

It is both fascinating and horrifying to overhear a bad argument between two old friends. The drama is compelling but you shudder at the pain of each wounding criticism.

I doubt Kai Eide, the U.N.’s top man in Afghanistan, will be holidaying again with his former deputy, Peter Galbraith, after a lacerating row between them over electoral fraud. Once the best of friends, the two have fallen out spectacularly over what should have been done to prevent the ballot stuffing, vote rigging and intrigue that Western powers now publicly admit badly marred the August 20 poll in Afghanistan. Were the stakes not so high, the fight could be brushed off as the consequence of clashing egos and the vagaries of human nature. But the dispute has cast doubt on whether any outcome of the vote can be considered legitimate. A second round may still happen, depending on a recount of suspect votes likely to conclude in a few days. On current trends President Hamid Karzai will emerge the winner, but will look like spoiled goods in the eyes of many in the Obama administration. Obama needs a credible political partner in Kabul to help him sell to Americans the cost in blood and treasure of whatever approach he eventually decides to take on continuing the counter-insurgency fight in Afghanistan.

Galbraith had been making the public running in the argument, charging that his efforts to prevent fraud were blocked and that he was muzzled by Eide, a veteran Norwegian diplomat. When he refused to keep quiet, says Galbraith, he was sacked. Eide’s actions or inactions have helped give the Taliban its greatest strategic victory in eight years of fighting Western forces, Galbraith has told anyone who would listen, including the op-ed pages of major American newspapers.

When Eide finally bit back in public he lined up a silent chorus of Western ambassadors to sit on a podium beside him in Kabul to demonstrate the solid support of ‘the international community.’ (The British, French and U.S. ambassadors seated beside Eide did not take questions, despite one being tossed deliberately at Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. envoy). The mild-mannered Norwegian roused himself into indignant righteousness and, without ever mentioning Galbraith by name, fought back against the charges of having winked at massive fraud by agents of Karzai and castigated his former deputy for discourteously breaching confidences.

From my chair in the room it seemed Eide was most hurt by what he said was Galbraith’s use against him of remarks made while the former US diplomat was a guest in his house for over two months. “My view is that private discussions around the dinner table should remain private.”

The allegations “have been an attack on my integrity,” said Eide. “It’s not dignifed, not fair and not true,” he said, adding in a resigned finale, “but that’s the way it is.”

While watching the Eide/Galbraith friendship dissolve in such a public train wreck I wondered how Afghans were reacting to the squabble. I’m back in Kabul after a year’s absence. The distance, alienation and distrust between Afghans and their foreign helpmates that I saw last October, and which the Taliban promotes, sustains and thrives upon, has not much eased and will not have been helped by this undignified row.

Afghanistan has wasted little time in accusing Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency of being behind a bomb attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul on Thursday.

Asked by PBS news channel whether Kabul blamed Pakistan for the bombing, Afghan ambassador to the United States Said Jawad said: "Yes, we do. We are pointing the finger at the Pakistan intelligence agency, based on the evidence on the ground and similar attacks taking place in Afghanistan."

But what has been more striking is how careful India has been not to assign blame too quickly.  Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao, the country's top diplomat, visited Kabul on Friday but said it was too early to say who was responsible for the bombing.

"I think the investigation should be completed," she said when asked if India thought Pakistan was behind the attack. "Whoever is responsible for this attack is against peace, is against democracy, is against people of Afghanistan and against the people of India."

India has in the past accused the ISI of being behind attacks on Indian interests in Afghanistan. An attack on the same Kabul embassy last year killed 58 people. And as discussed regularly on this blog, rivalry between Indian and Pakistan over Afghanistan complicates U.S. efforts to stabilise the country no matter how many extra troops it sends.

For a sense of deja vu, see this post from last August on India-Pakistan rivalry in Afghanistan, this post on the United States often conflicted approach in its dealings with the ISI, and this post from December asking whether it still made sense for President Barack Obama to send more troops to Afghanistan after last year's attack on Mumbai torpedoed hopes of a regional settlement.

So what is to be expected as a result of this latest bombing on the Indian embassy in Kabul?  Will it automatically lead to a fresh increase in tensions between India and Pakistan, or at the very least stall tentative attempts to repair relations soured by the Mumbai attack?

The answer to that is not as obvious as it might seem.

Pakistan's civilian government, which says its wants to hold peace talks with India, is already embroiled in an awkward stand-off with the Pakistan Army over provisions in the U.S. Kerry-Lugar aid bill which appear to curb the power of the military. So India might judge that now is not the right moment to raise the temperature.

Complicating the picture further is increasing violence within Pakistan itself - as highlighted by Saturday's attack by suspected Taliban militants on the Pakistan Army's headquarters in Rawalpindi, a day after 49 people were killed by a suicide car-bomber in the city of Peshawar. Do also read this chilling BBC account about the growth of militancy in south Punjab, in the heartland of Pakistan.

Add to that uncertainty about Obama's yet-to-be-completed review of strategy in Afghanistan, along with reports that the insurgency there is both growing and becoming increasingly independent of leaders in Pakistan, and you get one of the more fluid and volatile mixes in the history of relations between India and Pakistan.

All that makes it impossible to predict with any certainty the impact of the Kabul embassy bombing on relations between the two countries. One to watch closely in the days and weeks ahead.

(Photos: Site of bomb blast in Kabul; Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao; soldiers take position in Rawalpindi)

    The Dalai Lama believes the war in Afghanistan has so far been a failure, saying military intervention creates additional complications for the country.
    The exiled spiritual leader of Tibet, making his first visit to the Western Canadian city of Calgary in 30 years, said foreign military intervention against Taliban insurgents has only served to make the fundamentalist group more determined.  
    The war has been "so far, I think, a failure," he told reporters, adding that he could not yet judge its outcome. "Using military forces, the other hard-liners become even more hard ... and due to civilian casualties the other side also sometimes is getting more sympathy from local people." 
    U.S. President Barack Obama is weighing calls to boost troop levels and alter strategy to reverse what officials have said is a deteriorating military situation. But the Dalai Lama said it would all have been unnecessary had the United States and the European Union spent more on aid to the region.
    "Instead of spending billions and billions of dollars for killing they should have spent billions .... on education and health in rural areas and underdeveloped areas. (If they had) I think the picture would be different."

-- Written by Scott Haggett

(Photo: The Dalai Lama speaks at a conference in Calgary, Alberta, on October 1, 2009. REUTERS/Todd Korol)

A single paragraph in General Stanley McChrystal's leaked assessment of the war in Afghanistan has generated much interest, particularly in Pakistan.

"Indian political and economic influence is increasing in Afghanistan, including significant development efforts and financial investment," it says. "In addition the current Afghan government is perceived by Islamabad to be pro-Indian. While Indian activities largely benefit the Afghan people, increasing Indian influence in Afghanistan is likely to exacerbate regional tensions and encourage Pakistani counter-measures in Afghanistan or India."

He did not say anything that anybody did not already know. Pakistan has long been wary of India's growing influence in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in 2001 and is seen as reluctant to turn against the Afghan Taliban and other insurgent groups as long as it believes it might need them to counter India. The fact that he said it all suggested a renewed focus on the relationship between India and Pakistan, whose confrontation to the east spilled long ago into rivalry over Afghanistan to the west.

Pakistan's Daily Times said in an editorial the rivalry between India and Pakistan in Afghanistan highlighted the need for peace talks between the two nuclear-armed neighbours, which have fought three full-scale wars since independence in 1947, two of them over Kashmir.

"One must be clear in one’s mind that in many ways the mess in Afghanistan is actually a spillover of the Indo-Pak conflict in the region of South Asia," it said. "Pakistan’s policy of “strategic depth”, which reached a climax with the hijacking of an Indian airliner to Kandahar in 1999, was in reaction to the unresolved dispute over Kashmir which created the “threat of India” that Pakistan felt “from the east”. Even today, as Pakistan struggles against the Taliban, 80 percent of its army is stationed on the Indian border.

Dawn newspaper said McChrystal's words on India were "perhaps as significant as any other in the report".  The Americans appeared to have finally understood, it said, that the war in Afghanistan could not be won without help from Pakistan. "But that means gaining Pakistan’s full cooperation, which in turn means alleviating the national security establishment’s concerns vis-à-vis India."

However, as discussed in this analysis, India is in little mood to move rapidly towards peace talks with Pakistan until it takes greater action against militants it blames for last year's attack on Mumbai, although the two countries have been taking incremental steps towards repairing relations. Many argue that the powerful Pakistan Army would be unlikely to turn against militant groups it once cultivated to fight India in Kashmir, without a comprehensive peace settlement with India. (For an understanding of how complicated all this is, read this book reviewby Pakistani strategic analyst Ayesha Siddiqa.)

So, to win the war in Afghanistan, the United States needs help from Pakistan, which Pakistan in turn is reluctant to provide so long as it believes it is threatened by India to both the west and east.  From Washington's point of view, it needs to nudge Islamabad and New Delhi towards the negotiating table, by leaning on Pakistan to act against militant groups and putting pressure on India to resume peace talks. 

Here is another catch. Although the relationship between the United States and India blossomed under former President George W. Bush, there is far less warmth in New Delhi towards the Obama administration. The relationship started on the wrong foot with India concerned about increasing U.S. economic dependence on its rival China.

Now India and the United States are at loggerheads over President Barack Obama's nuclear non-proliferation drive.  India has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. That row, in turn, complicates efforts by Washington to persuade India to talk to Pakistan.

(Reuters file photos: Obama with Karzai and Biden; a British soldier in Afghanistan; hijacked Indian Airlines plane in Kandahar)

Back in 2008, even before Barack Obama was elected, Washington pundits were urging him to adopt a new regional approach to Afghanistan and Pakistan involving Russia, India, China, Saudi Arabia and even Iran. The basic argument was that more troops alone would not solve the problems, and that the new U.S administration needed to subsume other foreign policy goals to the interests of winning a regional consensus on stabilising Afghanistan.

It would be simplistic to suggest that the Obama administration's decision to cancel plans to build a missile-shield in eastern Europe was motivated purely -- or even primarily -- by a need to seek Russian help in Afghanistan. But it certainly serves as a powerful reminder about how far that need to seek a "grand bargain" on Afghanistan may be reshaping and influencing policy decisions around the world.

"Securing Afghanistan and its region will require an international presence for many years, but only a regional diplomatic initiative that creates a consensus to place stabilizing Afghanistan ahead of other objectives could make a long-term international deployment possible," Barnett Rubin and Ahmed Rashid argued in their much-cited 2008 policy paper titled "From Great Game to Grand Bargain". (pdf document).

Many of those arguments reappeared in a more recent report by the Asia Society (pdf document) -- formerly chaired by U.S special envoy to Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke -- so they are worth studying closely.

The ideas were ambitious and far-reaching, from remapping relations between Russia and the United States, prodding India and Pakistan towards a peace deal on Kashmir, seeking help from Iran and drawing in China and Saudi Arabia.  Some of those ideas were blown off course by the financial crisis, by the row in Iran over its disputed election, and by last November's attack on Mumbai which undermined U.S. attempts to steer India and Pakistan towards a peace deal.

And recently, they had been almost completely drowned by the media focus on military tactics and the merits of sending more troops to Afghanistan. With the U.S. decision to cancel the missile shield, one of those ideas -- about seeking Russian help in Afghanistan -- may have finally managed to break above the surface again.

In the case of Russia, the question was always about what price the United States was willing to pay to win Moscow's help in Afghanistan, possibly through less ardent support for NATO aspirants Ukraine and Georgia and a review of the missile shield due to be set up in the Czech Republic and Poland.

Obama already moved to try to assuage fears in Moscow and elsewhere that the United States might be seeking a permanent military presence in Afghanistan, a long-standing concern in Russia wary of having U.S. troops in what it sees as its backyard. “Make no mistake: we do not want to keep our troops in Afghanistan. We seek no military bases there," Obama said in his speech in Cairo in June. 

But it has been unclear how much further he might be willing to compromise to win Russia's support for what has become widely known as "Obama's war" in Afghanistan.

As discussed in this post, the Moscow Times spelled out what it saw as the price of Russian cooperation in Afghanistan in an op-ed published before Obama's inauguration:

“Afghanistan may well define your foreign policy legacy the way Iraq defined Bush’s," it said. "You will need all the support you can muster, including from Iran. You will also need Russia’s support. Moscow understands that the stability of its southern flank will hugely depend on what happens on the Hindu Kush mountain range in eastern Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan. But Moscow is torn between giving support to the West and preparing for the West’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. The latter would mean cutting deals with the Taliban locally and relying on China strategically. You can help Russia make the right choice.”

Of course, there are many other reasons for, and consequences of, the U.S. decision on the missile shield, as discussed here and here.

But if anyone wants a steer on the likely direction of U.S. foreign policy, and its implications globally, it's probably worth rereading Barnett Rubin's "grand bargain" proposal from last year. Diplomacy is the art of the possible, and nobody expects the recommendations to be followed to the letter. But with Obama a considerably more cerebral president than his predecessor, the old "Read my Lips" slogan probably needs to be replaced with a new one: "Read the pdf."

(You can also find regular updates on the progress in relations between India and Pakistan -- one of the key themes of that report -- on "Pakistan:Now or Never", most recently in this post)

(Reuters photos: Girl in Afghanistan; Holbrooke, Obama)

Try hard as you can, there doesn't seem to be any escaping from comparing America's eight-year war in Afghanistan to the one it fought in Vietnam.

Every now and then, either when there is a fresh setback or a key moment in Afghanistan's turbulent history, like last week when it went to the polls to choose a president, the debate flares anew.

Foreign Policy magazine has a provocative piece headlined "Saigon 2009: Afghanistan is today's Vietnam. No question mark needed." No matter who wins last week's election, America is certainly not winning the war in Afghanistan because it is committing the same mistakes it did in Vietnam, authors Thomas H.Johnson and M Chris Mason argue.

The parallels are just too strong, too structural to be ignored. Both Afghanistan and Vietrnam (prior to U.S. engagement there) had surprisingly defeated a European power in a guerrilla war that lasted a decade, followed by a civil war which last another decade. Insurgents in both enjoyed the advantage of a long, trackless and unclosable border and sanctuary beyond it, the authors say.

Both were land wars in Asia with logistics lines more than 9,000 miles long and extremely harsh terrain with few roads, which nullified U.S. advantages in ground mobility and artillery. Almost exactly 80 percent of the population of both countries was rural, and literacy hovered around 10 percent. In both countries, the United States sought to create an indigenous army modeled in its own image, based on U.S. army organization charts.

But above all, the United States has consistently and profoundly misunderstood the nature of the enemy in each circumstance, the authors say. "In Vietnam, the United States insisted on fighting a war against communism, while the enemy was fighting a war of national reunification. In Afghanistan, the United States still insists on fighting a secular counterinsurgency, while the enemy is fighting a jihad.".  In short, it is hard, almost impossible, to defeat an enemy you don't understand.

Already, like the Vietnam war, support is starting to dwindle at home with a Washington Post-ABC poll showing the number of Americans who believed the war in Afghanistan was worth fighting slipping to below 50 percent.

Is Afghanistan already starting to weigh on President Barack Obama, then ? The New York Times this weekend questioned whether he was fated to be another Lyndon B. Johnson,  and not another Abraham Lincoln or the second coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt as his supporters portrayed him to be even before he took office.

Each presidency is different, but it is "the L.B.J. model — a president who aspired to reshape America at home while fighting a losing war abroad — is one that haunts Mr. Obama’s White House as it seeks to salvage Afghanistan while enacting an expansive domestic program," the newspaper said.  Obama himself  has expressed concern that Afghanistan may yet hijack his presidency, it reported based on accounts of a group of historians who had dinner with him at the White House this summer.

Like Johnson, Obama has framed Afghanistan as a war of necessity and not choice. Just as Johnson had no choice but to fight in Vietnam to contain communism,  America has to be engaged in Afghanistan as the bulwark against international terrorism.  "Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban  insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans," he told the Veterans of Foreign Wars at their convention in Phoenix last week.

But is it really a war of necessity ? Richard Haas, the president of the Council of Foreign Relations, argues it was necessary to go into Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11, but no longer to remain there. Wars of necessity must meet two tests, he says in an op-ed in the New York Times. They must involve vital national interests, and second, a lack of viable alternatives to the use of military power to defend those interests.

While it was necessary to invade Afghanistan to oust the Taliban,  now that there is a friendly government in Kabul is it necessary to maintain a military presence ? While it is true that the government is weak, and unable to enforce its writ in large parts of the country, it is equally true that terrorism cannot be eliminated even if you had a strong government, Haas argues.

 Militants could still operate from Afghanistan and would put down roots elsewhere. And Pakistan’s future would remain uncertain at best.

Moreover, he says  there are alternatives available.  The United States can begin to curtail  ground combat operations and emphasise drone attacks on militants, the training of Afghan police officers and soldiers, development and diplomacy to fracture the Taliban.

A more radical approach would be withdraw completely and focus on regional and global counter-terrorism efforts and homeland security initiatives to protect the United States from threats that may emanate from Afghanistan, Haas suggests, In that sense, Afghanistan would resemble the approach toward Somalia and other countries where governments are unable or unwilling to take on militants, and the United States eschews military confrontation.

But is the world ready for that ?

[Photographs of Afghan women voting, U.S. troops in Bagram and Obama in Phoenix last week]

TEGUCIGALPA - When ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya made a symbolic (and brief) return to his homeland on Friday, what could have been a potentially dangerous situation turned out to be a show for live television — a far cry from the bloody coups of the past in Latin America.

Even as he walked toward the border in sight of Honduran security forces waiting to arrest him, Zelaya, in his trademark cowboy hat, took a call from CNN’s Spanish language channel and conducted a long interview with the broadcaster.

The de facto leader of Honduras, Roberto Micheletti, dismissed the scene as a media circus, “irresponsible, ill conceived and not very serious.”

Micheletti’s interim government has been using the media, too.

State television has been repeatedly playing rousing music over pictures of pro-Micheletti marches and slogans urging Hondurans to “Hold Firm” for peace and democracy. One of the most frequently played pieces is the stirring theme music from the 1980s movie about U.S. Navy fighter pilots, “Top Gun.”

Periodically, authorities cut transmission on all cable channels and broadcast announcements about curfews on local TV stations. Uniformed police officers are hosting news programs. 

At the time when Zelaya was staging his symbolic come-back on the border, state TV stations were showing a meeting of an electoral committee and a demonstration by Hondurans waving blue and white flags and holding placards (some in English) praising Micheletti and denouncing Zelaya.

Television spots accusing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a socialist and ally of Zelaya, of orchestrating the coup are also frequent. 

Venezuelan TV channel Telesur has been blocked in Honduras, leaving many with cable to rely on CNN en Espanol as their main source of television news from outside Honduras. (Spanish speakers should read this article by my colleague Juana Casas)

Most Honduran newspapers support the new government and a pro-Zelaya radio station, Radio Globo, is the one of the few Honduran news outlets giving airtime to Zelaya himself.

This may be the age of the Internet, but Honduras is one of the poorest countries in Latin America and Zelaya’s supporters, as he tells it, are “the people.”

Some supporters of Micheletti have been using the Internet to try to persuade the outside world that Zelaya’s ouster was not a coup. To read a lively debate on this matter see this blog I wrote earlier in the month.

As the crisis drags on with no immediate sign of a solution, tell us who you think is winning the media war.  

Check out some of the web sites of the Honduran newspapers here:

La Tribuna, La Prensa, El Heraldo, Tiempo

PHOTOS BY REUTERS show Zelaya on the border on July 24 and pro-Micheletti supporters a few days after the June 28 coup.