Barton and Riedel on the president's speech

Rick Barton and Bruce Riedel commenting in the NYTimes on the President's speech:

“We underfinanced, undermanned and under-resourced the war in Afghanistan for the last four years, and now we face a serious threat that the Taliban will succeed in destabilizing the country enough in 2007 to make the Karzai government collapse at some point,” said Bruce Riedel, a scholar at the Saban Center for Middle East Studies at the Brookings Institution, a liberal-leaning research organization in Washington. He called the speech “a long overdue recognition that we need to do a lot more.”

Both Mr. Riedel and Rick Barton, an expert in Afghanistan reconstruction at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said Mr. Bush’s new strategy did not do enough to promote security and economic development. Mr. Barton, who published a report in 2005 measuring progress in Afghanistan in that year, is about to publish another, and said the situation has turned measurably worse since his first study. “We’ve gotten into a situation where things have really turned negative and the average Afghan has lost confidence in both the safety of his country and the ability of the leadership to turn things around,” Mr. Barton said. He said the president “is definitely acknowledging that, but his reality therapy is not as thorough or as complete as I think it needs to be.”