Internally, the US President is coming under huge strain; his fellow Democrats don’t support adding more troops to the Afghan war since it is highly unpopular with their base; the Republicans did not support his announcing of a deadline to commence withdrawal of troops. The biggest fear of everyone is that by announcing a date, the Taleban, which has been out of power for 8 years now and fighting the insurgency, can afford to wait 2 more years and then make the effort to overthrow Karzai when the US leaves. Pakistan would no longer be willing to invest in an effort to fight the Taleban if it sees the US disengaging from the area, and needs a friendly Afghanistan to counter India.
So now, you have US officials trying their best to persuade leaders from all over that the US has not announced a disengagement, that the withdrawal would only happen if the Afghan army and security services are in a good enough condition, and that the end date for the withdrawal is not decided. Further, the US would set up bases in the area to ensure that it retains a sizable balance. However, Obama is also being accused of making decisions based on politics by ensuring that a withdrawal is in place when he is fighting for re-election.

Now the situation in Afghanistan is that there are just not enough troops on the ground to support the cities, forget the countryside where the Taleban reigns supreme. The US military commander in Afghanistan (Gen. Stanley McChrystal), who was given charge earlier this year, has now asked for 40,000 – 60,000 troops more, making clear that less number of troops than that will lead to a defeat. Obama is already facing many of his own supporters who are asking for a reduction of troops from Afghanistan, or even a complete removal. It is difficult for him to add the number of troops requested, but any refusals (or even going with his veep’s half-baked proposal of less troops, and more missiles and UAV’s) will open him upto the charges of being weak on national security. And if the US now withdraws or reduces its presence, or allows the Taleban to control more territory, this will be a sign of weakness that the US cannot really exhibit, given that it has foes such as Al-Qaeda (and its linked organizations), enemy states such as Iran and North Korea. For these foes, a US withdrawal means that the US does not have the stomach to go in for fights, and is an open invitation to attack it closer to home. Obama needs to take the correct decision, looking into mind the long term, and disregarding the recent award of the Nobel Peace Prize to him.

US troops are withdrawing from towns and cities in Iraq, six years after the invasion, having formally handed over security duties to new Iraqi forces. A public holiday – National Sovereignty Day – has been declared, and the capital, Baghdad, threw a giant party to mark the eve of the changeover. US-led combat operations are due to end by September 2010, with all troops gone from Iraq by the end of 2011.
Some 131,000 US troops remain in Iraq, including 12 combat brigades, and the total is not expected to drop below 128,000 until after the Iraqi national election next January. The US Ambassador to Iraq, Christopher Hill, said there would be no major reduction in forces until next year but the pullback was a “milestone”.

The current Iraqi Government is treating the event as a major watershed in its regaining of the total control of Iraq, since the presence of US troops in the cities ensured that the Iraqi Government could not take many steps that they would have liked (such as when the Government wanted to apply pressure on Sunni sections in the cities, they had to face some resistance from the US army). With the general elections also due in the next few months, the Iraqi Government is sure to use the opportunity to claim this withdrawal as a victory.
However, the withdrawal does not really reduce the number of troops in the country, and many of the problems that Iraq faces are still there:
1. Security remains a problem
2. Simmering tension between the Sunni and Shia factions remains in place, increased by the impending elections and signs of fraud
3. The army and police are still not upto the required level of training, and not free from factional bias

Experts have warned that the richly diverse coral reefs of the Coral Triangle around southeast Asia will disappear by the end of the century if action is not taken against climate change. As well as the loss of one of the world’s most diverse underwater ecosystems, the knock on effect would be the collapse of coastal economies that supports around 100 million people, according to the WWF- commissioned study outlined at the World Ocean Conference this week.
The Coral Triangle includes 30 percent of the world’s reefs, 76 percent of global reef building coral species and more than 35 percent of coral reef fish. “In this world, people see the biological treasures of the Coral Triangle destroyed over the course of the century by rapid increases in ocean temperature, acidity and sea level, while the resilience of coastal environments also deteriorates under faltering coastal management. Poverty increases, food security plummets, economies suffer, and coastal people migrate increasingly to urban areas.”

The report concludes that unless we take action to rollback some of the effects of global warming, the direct impact on fishing will cause huge problems to the global fishing economy and impact people who are dependent on fishing as both livelihood and for their food needs, and yet, if one evaluates where we are with trying to roll back emission levels, it is still talk and no action. The Obama administration, for all its talk about making changes in the Bush administration policy of action on global warming, has not taken any concrete action.

At the same time, this inaction was something that the western backers of Pakistan were not able to understand; it seemed like a vindication of the fact that the Taliban was not something that the government or the military seemed to want to tackle; and the pressure exerted was incredible. There was a huge flurry of articles and interviews about how Pakistan is on the verge of collapse, that the institutions have lost credibility and were not able to ensure social justice in the country (which encouraged the growth of a force such as the Taleban), that the nuclear arms hosted by Pakistan were in danger of being taken over by the Taleban, and so on.
There is also another view that is seeming to emerge, that action taken by the Government on the urging of western Governments would turn the population further against the west and against the actions of their own Government; already there is a feeling that this is not Pakistan’s war and that forcing the Pakistani army to fight their own Muslim brothers is just not done. The view was that it needed for people to hear more about the kind of society that the Taleban is bringing on, and that as the Taleban occupied more areas of the country and that people realized that now they were in mortal danger, that this was not something that was happening far away, they would finally turn against the Taleban. This would be a time for the Government to take action.
Currently, the Pakistani Government has declared that the pact in Swat is dead, and fierce military action is underway against the Taleban. There is no common thoughts on whether the Government did indeed plan it this way, or whether the action was taken because the pressure on the Pakistani Government and the army was proving impossible to face; indeed, the fact that the Pakistani military has always been a proponent of the strategic depth option in Afghanistan makes it hard to say either way. It needs to be seen whether the action will go all the way, or will end when Zardari comes back to Pakistan.

So, when it became known that AIG was giving bonuses totalling in the hundreds of millions of dollars to its executives and other key people, and many of them were in fact part of the financial derivatives group within the company that caused the collapse of AIG, there was a huge outcry. Joe Smith, the average guy, was bound to scream and protest, and wanting action from the politicians. The politicians in turn were struck at 2 extremes. Here was a major public pressure to do something, and they were unable to respond because there was apparently legal advice that the bonuses were not revocable, and had to be granted. Politicians, being people with power and a need to showcase that they were in tune with public pressure, immediately crafted a bill that would get these bonuses back through taxes (never mind that many of these same politicians had voted to spend huge amounts of money in pork-barrel projects in the past, such as the Bridge to nowhere in Alaska).
Obama did not come out of this smelling of roses. Obama had come to power with a huge sentiment for him, that here is this young beacon of hope who will change things and take Government away from the usual wheeling-dealing ways and into a new era. However, Obama, like many other politicians, is finding that you can be hit by your own agenda; so, it would seem like that many of his actions were taken in the belief that there will not be much opposition (after all, he is the people’s darling). However, first in the manner of many of his initial nominations of whom some had to back down because of some defect in their past history, and now, in the matter of this AIG stuff, the Obama Administration is struggling.
First, Obama’s treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner was criticized for not doing enough to block these bonuses (in all fairness, the guy is up to his neck in trying to turn the economy around, and yet, it would be equally fair to expect him to keep track of any economic issue that could inflame public sentiment); and even more so, he was somewhat dismissive of the scandal initially; it was only later when the pressure started building up very rapidly did Obama start expressing his outrage so that it would seem like that he is also opposing these bonuses to ‘fatcats’. He eventually used his weapon of claiming full responsibility and trying to defuse the situation, a policy that seems to have worked to some extent. However, Obama has to contend with this bill that would add a huge amount of tax to any bonuses for companies that have received money from the Government, and a number of such institutions are opposing any such bill.
One lesson from this episode for Obama would be to not keep on expecting that his popularity will defuse issues; the Republicans are still smarting from the drubbing that they received, and will use any opportunity to highlight issues that could crack the high popularity of Obama.

Once the Obama Administration came to power, the expectation was that many of the excesses of the Bush era would come to a stop; however, if you look at the policy position of Obama once in power, he has dumped the term of ‘enemy combatant’ but kept the same powers (almost) (refer this article):

There will no longer will be “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Obama administration said Friday. Moreover, the new president no longer claims that his title as commander in chief allows him to order people deemed to be dangerous captured and held without trial. Having abandoned a favored Bush administration term in the war on terrorism, however, the new administration has claimed roughly the same power to hold Guantanamo’s detainees indefinitely — even those who never held a gun or went near a battlefield.
President Obama’s lawyers said Congress gave him the authority he needed when it authorized the use of military force one week after the Sept. 11 attacks. It said the president can use the military against “nations, organizations or persons” who planned or aided the terrorist attacks. President George W. Bush cited the same authority when he created the prison at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, but he also said he could act on his own as commander in chief.

For people who had been hoping that the change in administration will lead to a total reversal of policies, the enunciation of the new policy would not have been very comforting. One factor that would have led to the policy not being as liberal as many would have liked was the statistic released recently about the new of people who were released from Guantanamo who went back to being terrorists and fighting US interests.

Men were nearly evenly split between the two candidates, with 46 percent giving the win to McCain and 43 percent to Obama. But women voters tended to give Obama higher marks, with 59 percent calling him the night’s winner, while just 31 percent said McCain won. “It can be reasonably concluded, especially after accounting for the slight Democratic bias in the survey, that we witnessed a tie in Mississippi tonight,” CNN Senior Political Researcher Alan Silverleib said. “But given the direction of the campaign over the last couple of weeks, a tie translates to a win for Obama.”

More than two-thirds of debate watchers agreed that both McCain and Obama would be able to handle the job of president if elected. National security has been an issue where McCain has held an advantage, but his edge over Obama — 49 percent to 45 percent — on the question of which candidate would best handle terrorism is within the poll’s 4.5 percent margin of error.

Their positions are now almost set in stone; McCain is now firmly in the camp of the conservative wing of the Republican Party, although the initial excitement over the selection of a young, impressive lady conservative such as Sarah Palin is now starting to wear off. The relentless press has been pushing and finding the kinks in her armor, and attacking all the weak spots that it can find. At the same time, the ‘change’ and ‘values’ candidate Obama is seemingly running against a section of voters who will not vote for him (racist?), and has started running more attacking and negative ads that attack the McCain camp.
It is not only the campaigns that have positions set in stone because of their support bases; even huge sections of the voters have decided which of the parties they traditionally vote for, it is just the undecided voters who will decide who becomes the next President of the United States.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama met today in Kabul with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who has been criticized by the Illinois senator for failing to reduce corruption in the nation’s government. The meeting at the presidential palace lasted more than one hour and was followed by a lunch, according to Karzai spokesman Siamac Herawi. The two discussed a range of issues, including “U.S.-Afghan cooperation to defeat terrorism, the root causes of terrorism, Afghanistan’s achievements in recent years and the way forward,” Herawi said.

The journey is Obama’s first to Afghanistan, where the U.S. led an invasion to topple the Taliban following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Since then, Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters have established themselves in rugged mountains along the Pakistani-Afghan border and have used that sanctuary as a base from which to attack U.S. and Afghan forces in Afghanistan. Obama, who stopped in Kuwait on the way to Afghanistan to see U.S. soldiers, is also scheduled to go to Baghdad, Amman, Israel and the West Bank, Berlin, Paris and London.

McCain had been egging on Obama to have a trip to the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, and this trip, if it goes to Iraq and to European capitals, will allow Obama to present himself as having a foreign policy. In that sense, this was an essential trip so that he proclaim that he has met commanders in the field, as well as started the process to mend relations with many partners of the US.

Marking the end of her historic presidential candidacy Saturday, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton urged her teary, angry, disappointed but finally cheering supporters to unite behind rival Sen. Barack Obama, for whom she gave a full-throated promise to “work my heart out” to win the White House in November for Democrats. Clinton gave thanks to her disappointed supporters, especially women, many of whom felt their candidate was diminished by a subtle sexism in the press and a party that diminished her candidacy, mocking her pantsuits and downplaying her achievements.
Many Clinton supporters are convinced that the strength she showed toward the end of the primaries, winning nine of the last 14 contests, including big swing states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio, exposed serious weaknesses in the Obama candidacy among core Democratic voters – seniors, older women, Latinos and blue-collar whites. Some believe having Clinton on the ticket would reel these voters back to the Democratic fold, while others think she should stay off, thinking it would be a losing Democratic campaign.

This will still be a long election. What must be worrying for the Obama camp is that even when it was clear that Hillary did not have a chance, even then there were states that voted for Hillary; and the swing state of Ohio must be even more worrying. Clinton won those voters who would also be strongly wooed by McCain as potential swing voters, attracted by a Republican candidate who does not seem a religious conservative, and who in fact could have been deemed as a candidate just a bit more to the right of Bill Clinton. One option is for Obama to co-opt Hillary as a Vice-Presidential candidate, but that is nowhere being decided right now.