Republicans are astonished and, in some cases, sickened by the ‘lurch to the left’ that America made by voting for Barack Obama. To them, I say: don’t be silly.

If anything, it is a correction, a very logical reaction to a process started in 2000, when a true ‘lurch to the right’ was rammed down the electorate’s throat. Obama’s election is a belated response to the election of Bush.

Each action begets a reaction. A positive action usually begets a positive response – and a negative action more often than not elicits a negative reaction.

On some network during election night, some analyst at some point voiced his astonishment about “how America seems to be abandoning its history of centrist politics”. I was appalled; here was a guy whose name I had never heard of, but who was a full-time paid analyst, and who somehow missed that in 2000, a man who said that he would unite the country, who promised that he was not a divider, started an ideological divide the likes of which no one had seen since the days of Barry Goldwater.

George W. Bush veered off wildly to the extreme right, on a quest to appease only the ultra-conservative, yes even extreme wing of the Republican religious wingnuts. In 2004, when so many people already had enough of that lurch that came to them like a thief in the night, many were swayed to vote for Bush again out of fear for terrorists. Bush was re-elected by the thinnest of margins.

That should have humbled him, but it didn’t.

Where was Fred Barnes of the Wall Street Journal back in those days, in 2000 and 2004, to accuse America of ‘lurching to the right‘? Robert Novak, on the day after the election of Barack Obama, wrote that Obama has “no mandate”. By the time of this writing, Obama has 349 votes in the electoral college.

What constitutes a “landslide” in Robert Novak’s dimension? Or even a mandate? Where was Novak in 2000 and 2004, to accuse Bush of not having a mandate, even though Bush had barely eeked out a win with 286 seats in 2004 – and even after having to resort to calling in the aid of the Supreme Court in 2000?

The answer is, of course, that Barnes and Novak felt pretty much at ease with whatever Bush was doing. But in 2008, a vast majority of the US electorate felt that they had to change course. The ship had veered off too much to starboard.

So the voters voted for a correction, and bringing the country back on course. If anything, the change Obama is seeking doesn’t seem too radical. Yes, universal health care is, in light of US history, a historical and possibly even ‘radical’ departure from the (supposedly) centrist course. But as for the rest of his platform, I’m convinced that not the slogan ‘change we can believe in’ but rather ‘a return to the way we were’ would have been more to the point.

What is so terrible about that? I wish Barnes and Novak would read this, and answer that question.

But they won’t. It’s probably a good thing that Obama’s quest for ‘new, uniting politics’ can do without the likes of Barnes and Novak. I wish them well while they lower themselves into the dustbin of history, where ‘old politics’ has been languishing for a good 24 hours already.

John McCain is slipping fast in the polls. As he senses that he has nothing to lose, the gloves are off. Team Obama will now face one mother of a nasty Republican fighting machine. They will give Obama no quarter, not one inch, and each and every moral objection will be thrown aside. And it started today.

A number of McCain campaign aides, close associates and anonymous sources from within the GOP machine have in the past 48 hours confirmed that the war is on. There won’t be any backing down; anything they can find or make up to hurt Obama, will be used. That strategy holds a big risk for the 72 year old.

When he tried the same approach, about three weeks ago, he got chastised for spouting discredited lies by not only the Obama campaign, but also the press. But it worked; Obama’s numbers started going down, McCain’s went up – and then the financial meltdown happened, upsetting the McCain game plan.

So now he’s going to go back on the attack, but with a true vengeance. Palin started today, raking up Obama’s old connections to some people. Except for Jeremiah Wright, no subjects are off-limits. But McCain had better be careful still, because there’s a new risk involved.

By now, with only a month before Election Day, voters are deciding on their choice, and they’re now adding the ‘is my candidate of choice presidential material’ question.

Bill Clinton knows how incredibly important it is to come across as being stable, cool, not worried. It makes you look presidential. That’s what he told Barack Obama during that lunch, about a month ago: “Act like a president.” And that Obama did during his first debate with McCain. The latter continuously attacked Obama and the pundits thought McCain had won the night.

But the voters didn’t think so. All the polls after the debate showed that Obama had not only clearly won the debate, but he’d also…surprised them by coming across as ‘presidential material’.

So he is viable. Presidential.

McCain has been trying to shape himself as presidential material as well – his stunt to suspend his campaign and go to Washington a day later because of the financial crisis, was evidence of that.

But now McCain is in danger of putting himself in a position he can’t get out of. That of being seen as an aggressive idiot, a screamer who spouts lies and slanders people.

That’s not perceived as being very ‘presidential’ by many people.

Still, and judging from what happened in 2000 and 2004, former Bush campaign aide Steve Schmidt, who now runs McCain’s campaign,  and given that many voters are susceptible to believing lies, McCain might get away with it.

Many a time have I been scolded for assuming publicly that the colour of Barack Obama’s skin would play its part in the upcoming election. Many a times have I been warned that racism in America is on the wane. Many a times have I been scolded for being prejudiced about Americans.

Well, they were right: not all Americans are prejudiced towards black people. Not all, just many.

I don’t believe the guys over at Fivethirtyeight.com, the people who say that they “do polls right”. I also don’t believe the aggregate of the polls at Realclearpolitics.com. Or Pollster.com. I don’t think neither of those companies or websites is correct, due to the Big Black Holes in this particular election.

I have three reasons to doubt polls more than ever.

1. Barack Obama is black. There, I’ve said it. Now, Big Black Hole Numero Uno is: how many people are telling the truth, when they get their evening phone call by a pollster’s volunteer who asks whether they’ll be voting Obama or McCain, and when they’re asked whether race is an issue? I can’t imagine one person who will blurt “Oh I ain’t voting for that guy, he’s black!” The irritating thing is, that nodoby knows whether this is an issue at all. So it’s a black hole in a black hole.

2. Turnout. This is the Holy Grail for Democratic pollsters. (And something more of them are desperately clinging to.) There are scores of strategists within the Obama campaign who believe that voter turnout this year is going to trump all records. And of course, they believe that most of those newly registered voters will turn out to vote for Obama.

I don’t believe it. Yes, Obama-leaning people have been registering in massive numbers, but the Big Question — which none of the polling companies or aggregators can answer — is whether it will be enough to offset the number of McCain-leaners. And, for that matter, no one seems to have measured whether the legion of the Anybody But Obama-crowd, who weren’t motivated to turn out until the rise of Sarah Palin, is now going to turn out to vote after all.

3. Doubt. People are still too much in doubt, that’s maybe the one thing that’s strikingly obvious from the polls (and a safe thing to conclude). People are swinging wildly, like a pendulum that’s out of whack.

And heck, aside from those three things, I’ve never trusted polls as absolutist measurements of popular opinion. I merely view them as harbingers of trends.

I for one do not believe that the unpolled people — those who ordinarily don’t go out to vote, but who the Democrats believe will now turn out in massive numbers — are a different species from those who are being polled.

Take a bunch of unlikely voters, compare their voting trends to those of likely voters, and you’ll see pretty much the same picture.

So therefore, I personally believe that if there’s going to be a higher turnout, that it will be divided among trend lines. And those trends do not look good for Barack Obama.

No matter which way you look at it — from the left, the right, from down below, above or behind — one can only conclude one thing: Obama is losing support, and McCain has made a huge comeback. And that’s still trending. Even the clearly Obama-leaning folks over at Fivethirtyeight.com have toned down their rhetoric; it seems as if they, too have resigned themselves to a fairly strong possibility of McCain winning the elections.

There’s no denying it. McCain’s comeback is HUGE. It also shows just how much a lot of independent voters, who are the ones who seem to literally be running over to McCain, were on the fence, unconvinced and unmotivated, resigned as they were that this year was going to be a Democratic year. Not so! The Republican base is rallied, people have started to believe again.

It means something, it cannot be denied. And against all this, if I look at the way things are trending, all that Obama has done and is doing now, isn’t helping. He’s had a darn good run in the past five days, bashing McCain over the head with everything that has gone wrong economically speaking.

So let’s see what the Harbingers of Trends tell us at the end of the week. Say, next Monday and Tuesday. And I predict the following:

Obama will have been slamming McCain over the head with McCain’s signature weakness, the economy, for 1,5 weeks next week. If Obama hasn’t reversed trends in the Harbingers of Trends (and McCain isn’t caught with an underage boy on a toilet in Utah, or something similar), he will lose this election.

Why? Because it would mean that for all the want of change among the voters, and all their fears about the economy, they simply didn’t care. It would also mean the Great Failure of the Obama strategists, because it would mean that, in the end, the economy was not the electorate’s main concern after all.

Two things: Barack Obama is a fast learner, and he’s a man of his word. First, he has learned from people who last week gave him the right advice, and second, he’s sticking by his promise that he would not allow the GOP to do to him what they did to Al Gore and John Kerry.

Obama and his campaign have been dominating the campaign, relentlessly bombarding McCain with everything they’ve got for more than 48 hours. That’s two full news cycles. And Team McCain seems to be getting worried, as they are back to responding to Obama. Two days ago, McCain was confidently saying that “the fundamentals of the US economy are strong”. Today, McCain is acknowledging that, yes, perhaps the economy is indeed in bad shape…

Let’s see if Team Obama can keep it up.

QUICK ADD TO QUICK: But there is a danger. If McCain can somehow manage to neutralize the economy-issue, by turning around and acknowledging the problems and make people believe that he, too, promises real change, then it’s back to square one for Obama.

A new Wall Street Journal / NBC poll (opens as Acrobat .pdf document) out today shows that a majority of voters questioned is comfortable with the idea of having Sarah Palin in the White House as vice-president, despite a “national debate” on whether she’s experienced enough for the job.

That’s very interesting. Because polls have for months been showing that voters are somewhat concerned over Barack Obama’s lack of experience. It is the very reason why Team McCain has from the start been highlighting Obama’s perceived “lack of experience”.  Obama selected Joe Biden, a Senator with 33 years of experience in foreign affairs, to be his running mate. That’s a lot of experience, but it hardly made a difference in the polls.

So what can we conclude from this? That experience is something that only troubles Obama? Or is experience simply not that important to voters?

To paraphrase Lord Acton: “ideology blinds, and absolute ideology blinds absolutely.”

That is at the core of the question, when trying to analyze why voters deem Obama’s lack of experience a problem, but are less concerned about Palin’s lack of experience. I think the explanation for that is that people are more inclined to forgive candidates for a lack of experience, if those candidates candidly and forcefully prove that their are vehemently defending the ideas of those voters.

Months ago, I had a conversation with a hard-right American woman on some political discussion forum. When I asked her why she would never vote for Hillary Clinton, she literally said that “politics is not the place for women”. She said that women should be taking care of the family, making sure that the kids are healthy and the house is clean, etcetera.

However, shortly after John McCain selected Sarah Palin to be his veep, I saw a post of the woman on the discussion forum again – and she was thrilled by Palin, and she would go out to register, and vote for her. All the talk about how women should not be in politics was out the window, because Palin is backing the same hard-right, Christian ideology. (Minus the “women should stay at home” stuff, obviously.)

That threw me back to the 2000 election. I had many discussions with American voters then about their presumed choice for the presidency. I was aghast; quite a few of the people who said they’d be voting for Bush, didn’t really like his socio-economic agenda, but said they “had to” vote for Bush as he was the only candidate promoting a conservative Christian agenda. Some of these people had voted for Clinton in ’92 and ’96, but were finally turned off by the Lewinsky scandal.

They all acknowledged that Clinton’s economic policies had worked, and worked fabulously, and they acknowledged that Al Gore would probably continue those succesful policies. But it didn’t matter.

During the 2000 election campaign, experience was also an important factor. Al Gore had been vice-president for 8 years, and had served in the Senate for many years before that. Bush, despite having been governor of Texas, was completely inexperienced in foreign affairs. He proved it by a number of gaffes during interviews and debates. But it didn’t matter.

Bill Clinton, while on the stump for Gore, famously pressed the voters to “choose wisely”. Nonetheless, for those Americans, ideology trumped wisdom. They all voted Bush in the end.

At the end of 2003, I talked to some of the same people again. The disaster that was Bush’s economic and fiscal “policy” was clear, and these guys weren’t stupid. But I wasn’t surprised at all when they said that they would still be voting for Bush. They all believed that Kerry would be just as tough as Bush as commander in chief, so that wasn’t the problem. No, their problem with Kerry was that he wasn’t promoting a Christian-conservative agenda. And perhaps Bush could finally install a new conservative Supreme Justice in the Supreme Court during his second term. They were finally turned off when Bush botched that with his Harriet Miers nomination.

To Christian fundamentalist wingnuts like them, people like Sarah Palin can do no wrong. If today documents showed up which clearly show that Palin illegally deducted millions in tax expenes, if today someone reports that Palin once drowned a kitten, or if Palin today says that as president, she’d sell Alaska to Canada, they would still support her.

As for independent, not necessarily very religious women who are flocking to Palin: as some polls have shown, many are voting for her because she’s a woman. A fairly large number of women now view Palin as the torch bearer of the feminist struggle for equality. Some have, without blinking, switched from the quite liberal Hillary Clinton to the ultra-conservative Sarah Palin. I’m charging here, but that’s a bit like a cow preferring a butcher over a PETA volunteer to have as her new friend.

That aside, it’s quite ironic for them to vote for someone because of her gender. These women seem to be making the same mistake as the misogynists they’re fighting. Misogynists will not vote for a woman because she’s a woman. Feminists, who joined the struggle to fight for acceptance of equality between men and women, now say that they are voting for Palin because she’s a woman. Misogyny in reverse.

I wonder how these women sleep at night. Oh wait, I know – “ideology blinds, but absolute ideology blinds absolutely.” And that while darkness helps people get to sleep! Of course, how could I forget…

Time for Team Obama to turn the lights on McCain, while also asking Palin what exactly she thinks of the economic policies of George W. Bush. Does she support his policies, like McCain does? And how does she feel about the fact that McCain doesn’t agree with her view on abortion, which holds that abortion should never be allowed – even not in the case of incest or rape? Isn’t that a problem?

If the game of Team McCain is to paint Obama as “just another tax-and-spend liberal”, i.e. your average Democratic candidate and nothing special, then it is time for Team Obama to paint Palin for what she is: an ultra-conservative, right-wing Republican. And you do that not by accusing or pointing fingers, but by continuously asking questions via the media.

The answer is to question her.

The pregnancy of Bristol Palin, McCain’s vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s daughter, will not affect the race. If anything, it will remind some independent-minded mothers of their own teen pregnancies (or their daughters’), and will only bond them to soon-to-be grandmother Palin. But it will probably also turn off a comparable number of christian wingnuts, so in the end, no win-no lose.

(The ‘QUICK’ is a new feature, to offer an opinion on a matter in a fast way. You will be seeing more of these. It’s sort of neo-Twitter – which is cool, and why? Because any word with the keyword ‘neo’ in front of it, is hot!)

There’s a strategy in nuclear war, believe it or not, that’s called Bravo-Romeo-Delta. The B stands for ‘blunting’, R for ‘retardation’, and D for ‘disrupting’. A blunting attack means that you’re trying to blunt the opposition’s capacity to strike you, retardation means you’re trying to take out your opponent’s communication infrastructure, and disruptive means you’re going all-out, in an effort to destroy your opponent’s means to conduct war. The Delta-stage is usually the last, and most destructive phase of nuclear conflict.

Over at RealClearPolitics, the GOP-leaning Tom Bevan looks at Barack Obama’s chances in getting 7 ‘red states’ to come over to his column. Bevan doubts that Obama’s strategy will work. But that’s beside the point. Obama’s campaign team is trying to ‘Bravo-Romeo-Delta’ the McCain team all at once. And the reason is that Obama simply has more money to buy ammunition, and the timeframe to do it.

Team Obama is aiming at seven red states to rake in, come november. Some states come across as viable targets, like Virginia and Indiana – both reddish states but with old industrial cities, where manufacturing jobs have disappeared fast in the past eight years.  A lot of people in those states are very angry with the Republican thugs that have trashed the US for all those years. Time for payback. In these two states, Obama stands a reasonable chance.

Normally, Indiana would not be in play. The people of the good Hoosier State are usually okay with voting Democrat when it comes to local politicians and even members of Congress, like Representatives and Senators. Evan Bayh, for instance. But Indiana normally votes GOP for the presidency. (I dunno, perhaps they want their presidents to have a destructive streak.)

But the other five states seem long shots. North Dakota, North Carolina, Montana, Georgia and Alaska aren’t exactly Democrat Land. Au contraire. So, Bevan concludes, Team Obama is hoping that it can lure Team McCain in spending some of his meagre funds in those states, therefore allowing him less money to spend in battleground states like Ohio and Florida.

Now flip the coin, and you can see why some McCain operatives must be getting restive over Obama’s spending spree in those seven states anyway, and regardless of Bevan’s arguments. The RealClearPolitics electoral college aggregate poll is revealing. The RealClearPolitics-count is 238 electoral votes for Obama, and 163 for McCain.

Count out the tossup states, and it’s still 322 votes for Obama, and 216 for McCain. People have so far been glaring at the popular national vote polls, which show the race between Obama and McCain increasingly tighten. But that’s not what either David Plouffe (Obama strategist) or McCain’s strategist Rick Davis are looking at.

Their eyes are fixed on the electoral college vote. So far, those numbers have been consistent, regardless of the national popular vote aggregate. Obama  has a pretty sizeable buffer to play around with that fantastic asset, like anyone with a lead in any election: time.

The situation on the battlefield is that Obama simply has more guns to fire, and the time to move them around. McCain has fewer guns and more ground to cover. He’s already racing around the country, hopping from state to state, and is dedicating his time almost exclusively to the local media. That’s telling, because that’s the kind of flying around candidates usually do to either pre-empt holes, or plug them in the last month or so.

The reason: even if Bevan is right and Obama in the end only gets two out of seven states, he will still have gained two states that are normally not in play for any generic Democrat. Even winning one state, Indiana, would be a hoot. And it would still mean that McCain had to have been on the defensive offense all the time, demanding too much of his overstretched artillery, while Obama’s guys are blasting them from every side.

And then there’s the foot soldiers. The mantra of the 2004 election was ‘ turnout, turnout, turnout’. Team Bush, of whom many people have now joined the McCain campaign, knew that a lot of Democratic-leaning voters were fired up to vote Bush out of office. So the GOP boosted its get out the vote-machine to levels never seen before. They managed to squeeze out approximately 60,000 more Bush-voters in Ohio after a very polarising campaign.

After they managed to tarnish John Kerry’s image as a war hero, the next step was reigniting feelings of fear among the electorate. Still, Bush almost lost and many of the 60,000 voters that gave him a second term had been canvassed incessantly by the Bush campaign machine. Oh, and the local political machine too – Ohio had a GOP governor, and thus blatantly GOP administrative infrastructure.

Polls show that the Bush foot soldiers of 2004 are no longer as motivated now as they were in 2004, and the political machine of Ohio has changed hands. Democrats run the place.

The same thing goes for states like Virginia and Indiana, but there’s a catch: in 2004, the GOP didn’t really need to build up big, expensive GOTV infrastructures in those two states. They will need to do so now; they simply cannot afford to take the chance of losing either one of them to Obama.

Team McCain is also betting on the GOP itself to help out their presidential candidate. That may be, but locally, the GOP is in problems. There’s not a whole lot of money to spare in the GOP congressional coffers, so the candidates won’t be very eager to share what little cash they have with McCain. And they will be even less inclined should Team Obama succesfully carry out another strategic attack: that of throwing McCain in with Bush.

If Obama succeeds in painting McCain as a Bush Republican, something which isn’t hard to do as McCain has embraced nearly all Bush policies, few Republican state candidates will want to infect themselves with the bad image.

So. Obama has the money, the ammunition, he has the time to place his artillery and foot soldiers wherever he wants them to, and that while he is in the position to paint the new general of the opposing army as a cardboard copy of the last general that lost a big battle.

Once again, this election is Obama’s to lose. With all he has going for him, we’ll see where he stands in three weeks, when I return from my holidays.

John McCain is on the offensive, and for all the wrong reasons. He has to find a way to dent Obama’s armor. For all intents and purposes, Obama is able to keep the initiative, constantly forcing his adversary to react and take on a defensive position. He is almost constantly asked by the media to respond to new Obama ploys.

In an effort to break that spell, McCain seems to have started a new offensive, directly attacking Obama’s persona. That puts him right where team Obama wants him. Unless something odd happens: if this continues, Obama will win the election.

John Nichols of thenation.com is getting a bit infatuated with Barack Obama. That’s fine, a lot of journalists are being sucked in. John McCain should stop bitching about it – he was yesterday’s sweetheart for a long time, but that’s what he is. Yesterday’s news, just like Hillary Clinton was.

So it was refreshing to see Nichols criticizing Obama for a change in an article pasted here, but unfortunately, Nichols missed the mark. He was right to criticize Obama, but for the wrong reason.

Both Barack Obama and John McCain are right: more troops are needed in Afghanistan, but with one unifying mandate, not two different ones that cancel each other out. As is currently the case.

So I wrote Mr Nichols an email. To which he didn’t respond, of course.

Dear Mr Nichols,

I read your article on the commitments Mr Obama made to Afghan leaders, on TheNation.com.

Fine article, good read, but I felt that some points were missing.

Like many people, you correctly state that there’s too much fighting going on, and not much building.

But that’s exactly the problem; the deployment to Afghanistan has become a chicken-or-the-egg dilemma.

As you know, the American troops are basically on a fighting mission named ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’, in Afghanistan. Their mandate is combat, and only combat.

Then there’s NATO’s ISAF, that has a very different mandate for the troops. ISAF is confined to (re)building, nation building, etc.

All good and well, but all the Afghans and the Taleban see are Western military uniforms.

Aside from that, the Taleban are very effective in applying what is basically an African tribal strategy. Instill fear, fear and fear among the civilian population, and ensure that the (re)building effort by NATO fails.

Their tactics are horrendous, and well documented by Dutch soldiers, who have been in Afghanistan since the start.

The biggest frustration of Dutch soldiers is that whenever they build a school or small hospital in a small rural town, the Taleban usually sneak into the town after the Dutch have left, and then raze the schools and hospitals. Those who have cooperated with the Dutch are killed, and often their entire families as well. They are public executions; young boys and girls are hanged up on their feet, so upside down, and then gutted, like one would with a cow. The warning is clear to the villages in close proximity: this is what happens to you when you cooperate with ISAF.

Dutch soldiers are now being spurned by local Afghan leaders. They would like to cooperate, but they say they can’t, because the Dutch (and other forces) won’t always be there to protect them.

In the beginning, ISAF troops made the error of promising Afghans that they were safe from the Taleban, that they’d be protected. Years of experience has shown the Afghans that those promises are empty.

And to Afghans, he who controls an area, rules that area. It’s that simple.

Another problem is the ISAF mandate. NATO troops are in Afghanistan, yes, but they’re there under a tight mandate. They are in principle not allowed to undertake offensive action against (known) Taleban forces. They are allowed to defend themselves, and the civilian population, but that’s it.

Dutch Special Forces have now taken to baiting tactics; they try to attract enemy fire, by for instance sending a lone jeep with soldiers into a known ‘hot zone’ and then faking that the jeep has a breakdown. Taleban spotters, often civilians whose family members have been taken hostage by the Taleban and so forced to enroll into their ranks, then go into action. All they usually do is call in the location of the jeep – but the talk via open walkie-talkie radio is then intercepted by the Dutch, the location of the civilian spotter located, and he is subsequently killed.

The Taleban then later show up, collect the remains, and present them to the inhabitants of the killed civilian’s town, exclaiming the perverse violence of the ISAF troops.

A couple of months ago, a Dutch TV programme comparable to ’60 Minutes’ found out that Dutch troops had started undertaking offensive action, to flush out the Taleban that had been systematically razing schools and hospitals in towns. The broadcast caused a political outcry. As a result, the Dutch forces are now back to full defensive ISAF duty. And they’re frustrated, because the results of their rebuilding efforts are nil.

This is happening throughout ISAF-‘controlled’ territory. Taleban attacks on the civilian population and ISAF troops are up. The number of hospitals, schools and medical posts in villages being razed is up. Production of poppies, the sale of which is probably the Taleban’s main source of income, is up by record numbers. And the ISAF troops are, by their mandate, not allowed to do anything about it.

Then Operation Enduring Freedom. US forces are fighting the Taleban hard, but there are two problems.

1) the population of the villages they half destroy while bombing Taleban troops who purposely take up positions in those villages, are VERY unlikely to aid the Americans and be anti-Taleban, and
2) the Taleban are constantly withdrawing to Pakistan, where GIs can’t touch them. (Eerily reminiscent of the VietCong’s retreat tactics into Laos and Cambodia.)

So US forces are doing something that the ISAF can’t – fighting offensive – but not doing what they should be doing after the fighting, which in turn is what ISAF is doing.

There are two main strategic problems.
1. Geographic divide. There are areas where the NATO ISAF troops simply are not allowed to operate.
This is Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) territory. This results in OEF GIs flushing out the Taleban from a village, and then moving on, with no ISAF troops following up to do the rebuilding – and staying there for a while to ensure that Taleban troops don’t sneak back in. Plus: Pakistan.

2. Mandate divide. As shown, the two operations have very different mandates. Problem is, if you change the ISAF mandate to allow for offensive (i.e., more risky) actions, most NATO countries will pull back their troops. (The Dutch had to extend their ISAF mandate period because no other NATO country wanted to send troops to replace the Dutch.)

The only way to solve this:
- ONE mandate, for all forces in Afghanistan.
- MORE troops, to ensure that newly built infrastructure (which is why ISAF’s there, for Christ’s sake!) isn’t immediately razed after the troops depart.

So far, both Obama’s and McCain’s proposals fall short of the mandate-thing.