Petraeus Is a Failure -- Why Do We Pretend He's Been a Success?
His ill-conceived effort to deny al-Qaida and the Taliban “safe havens” in Pakistan -- through drone aircraft bombing, special-forces assassination and perhaps torture
has backfired, driving the Taliban east into Pakistan, where they have joined local allies to weaken the Pakistani government
The Petraeus strategy has thus dramatically strengthened America’s enemies and helped destabilize a nuclear-armed nation of 170 million whose importance dwarfs Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
David Kilcullen, Petraeus’ own counterinsurgency adviser in Iraq, has characterized U.S. policy as a fundamental “strategic error ... our insistence on personalizing this conflict with Al Qaeda and the Taliban, devoting time and resources toward killing or capturing ‘high-value’ targets ... distracts us from larger problems.”
these “larger problems” include the potential “collapse of the Pakistani state,”
clipped from: www.alternet.org