Andrew Gavin Marshall: PunishingPakistan and Challenging Chinah

As Senator Obama became the President-elect Obama, his foreign policy strategy on Afghanistan was already being formed. In 2007, Obama took on veteran geo-strategist and Jimmy Carter's former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski as one of his top foreign policy advisers, and he remained his foreign policy adviser throughout 2008. On Obama's campaign, he announced that as President, he would scale down the war in Iraq, and focus the "War on Terror" on Afghanistan, promising to send in about 10,000 more troops and to strike next-door Pakistan, if top terrorists are spotted there. In October of 2008, before the Presidential elections, senior Bush administration officials gathered in secret with Afghanistan experts from NATO and the United Nations, to deliver a message to advisers of McCain and Obama to tell them that the situation in Afghanistan is getting worse, and that the next president needed to have a plan for Afghanistan before he took office, or else it could be too late. Both McCain and Obama had agreed to a troop increase for Afghanistan before he took office, or else, it could be too late. Both McCain and Obama had agreed to a troop increase for Afghanistan, essentially ensuring the continuity of empire from one administration to the next. A week after winning the election, Obama invited one of Hillary Clinton's top supporters and advisers to meet with him. Richard Holbrooke, who had worked in every Democratic administration since John F. Kennedy, which extended from the Vietnam War, in the sixties, to the Balkan conflicts of the nineties, was Clinton's Ambassador to the United Nations for the last year and a half of the Clinton administration. Obama had decided that Holbrooke should take on the the hardest foreign-policy problem that the administration faced: Afghanistan and Pakistan. Holbrooke wrote in March 2008, before Obama won the Presidency, that "The conflict in Afghanistan will be far more costly and much, much longer than Americans realize, and it will eventually become the longest in American history!"