COVER: Obama's Vietnam (All Overseas Editions). National Security Correspondent John Barry and Editor-at-Large Evan Thomas lay out the growing parallels between the war in Afghanistan and our long struggle in Vietnam. "The parallels are disturbing: the president, eager to show his toughness, vows to do what it takes to 'win.' The nation that we are supposedly rescuing is no nation at all but rather a deeply divided, semi-failed state with an incompetent, corrupt government held to be illegitimate by a large portion of its population," Barry and Thomas write. "The enemy is well accustomed to resisting foreign invaders and can escape into convenient refuges across the border. There are constraints on America striking those sanctuaries. Meanwhile, neighboring countries may see a chance to bog America down in a costly war. Last, there is no easy way out. "
http://www.newsweek.com/id/182650
(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20090201/NYSU002 )
A Turnaround Strategy. Newsweek International Editor Fareed Zakaria offers a four-step plan to help fix the situation in Afghanistan. Zakaria argues that we need to rethink our military strategy -- focusing more on securing the roads and major population centers -- and help clean up the Kabul government. "Reduced to its simplest level, the goal of American policy in Afghanistan should be to stop creating accidental guerrillas," Zakaria writes. It should make villagers "see U.S. forces as acting in their interests." But, most importantly, we need to make a distinction between Al Qaeda and the Taliban -- were elements of the Taliban to abandon Al Qaeda, we would not have a pressing national-security interest in waging war against them.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/182651
The Revenge Of The Near. Special Correspondent Sunil Khilnani reports that despite initial reports that the Mumbai attacks were "India's 9/11," the analogy didn't hold. While there were some similarities, the comparison oversimplified a situation whose implications are potentially much more threatening for India than those faced by the United States. September 11 was an attack by men from afar, whose message had little resonance with Americans. The Mumbai attackers came from next door, the world's largest Islamic republic and the chief global exporter of radical Islam. Unlike 9/11, the Mumbai attacks linked together two intricate causal currents --one reaching deep into India's own society, the other spilling out into the region and beyond.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/182538
The Coming Trade Wars. "It's hard to find a top economic official, economist or global business leader who doesn't recognize today's heightened dangers of protectionism," writes Jeffrey E. Garten, the Juan Trippe professor of international trade and finance at the Yale School of Management. "But rhetoric will not prevent a trade war, which is now, I believe, more likely that it has been at any time since the early 1970s." He writes that steady trade liberalization was in jeopardy even before the current financial and economic meltdown. For a few years now, prominent economists were raising warning flags that support for free trade was being eroded by the perception that trade was contributing to ever-greater income inequalities. "Now, however, the collapse of the global banking system, a deepening global recession . . . and the massive intrusion of governments into national economies -- a trend that can't help but politicize economic policy decisions -- have all added fuel to the fire.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/182539
INTERVIEW: Gideon Gono, Governor of Zimbabwe's Reserve Bank. Gono tells Newsweek that the sanctions against his country are more to blame for his country's collapse than him personally. "The West wants you to think it's because of mismanagement. But sanctions have had a devastating effect on the country. I cannot think of any genocide that is worse than that. By their very nature, sanctions are supposed to induce fear. It's like terrorism. It's callous."
http://www.newsweek.com/id/182541
How Japan Could Save the World. Tokyo Bureau Chief Christian Caryl reports that although Japan has become the Hamlet of Asia, endlessly fretting about its waning world influence while failing to do much about it, there is reason for hope. In some cases, such as piracy, Japan has already made real contributions to global problems -- and hinted at a way forward on other issues. Later this year, if the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DJP) wins the election and forms the next government, it will face a remarkable opportunity to launch bold new initiatives. And if the DJP does start tackling international problems, it will find it has plenty of resources at its disposal, starting with the Japanese economy.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/182542
France Goes Postal. Special Correspondent Tracey McNicoll reports on the growing popularity of Olivier Besancenot, a radical leftist with a penchant for Trotsky and Che Guevara and a platform that includes forbidding layoffs, boosting the minimum wage by one third, and giving everyone a euro 300 net raise. With bank nationalization suddenly a real point of discussion in the United States, Great Britain and elsewhere, Besancenot is taking things a step further. He wants the state to expropriate banks and insurance companies, bankrupt or not, to create a giant public banking service run by the people. Anywhere but France, the cartoonish spokesman of the Communist Revolutionary League, a Trotskyite political party, would be relegated to the fringe. But in France, Besancenot, a postman in his day job, is a star. And he has become the country's most influential opposition figure.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/182543
WORLD VIEW: Beware the European Street. Denis MacShane, a Labour M.P. and a former minister of Europe in Britain, writes that while everyone knows about the "Arab street," to which most policymakers listen with care, now may be the time of the European street. "More and more disenchanted citizens are deciding that the politics of the streets make more sense than their ruling politicians," MacShane writes. "Europe's elite may have just made its annual pilgrimage to Davos, but no one is listening to the incantations from the Swiss Alps. Instead, the European public has staged angry demonstrations in more and more countries."
http://www.newsweek.com/id/182540
THE LAST WORD: Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency. During the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, ElBaradei spoke to Newsweek's Special Diplomatic Correspondent Lally Weymouth and defended himself against claims by several Bush administration officials and some nonproliferation experts that he soft-pedaled criticisms of Iran's nuclear program in order to avoid justifying a U.S. military attack on that country. "This is a complete misunderstanding," ElBaradei says. "We have done as much as we can do in Iran to make sure that we understand the history and the present status of their [nuclear] program, to try to push them as far as we can, within our authority, to come clean ... Iran has a technical aspect and a political aspect. The technical aspect is our part of the job. The political aspect is the dialogue to build confidence and trust. I have said for the past six years the policy of building trust between the West -- the United States in particular -- and Iran has failed completely. We haven't moved one iota."
http://www.newsweek.com/id/182525
/PRNewswire -- Feb. 1/
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