Home pagePress CenterIn the Media Anthony Cordesman, the CSIS Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy, was quoted by the Christian Science Monitor, "Afghan Fight Drawing Foreign Jihad."
In the Media | Detail
Anthony Cordesman, the CSIS Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy, was quoted by the Christian Science Monitor, "Afghan Fight Drawing Foreign Jihad."
Washington - This week's brazen and deadly attack on a US-Afghan outpost in an area near the Pakistani border is raising new concerns that foreign fighters bent on fighting the West are retraining their sights from Iraq to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
"Foreign fighters do make a difference, and it's important to note their increase and the role they play, particularly in correlation to Al Qaeda," says Anthony Cordesman, a prominent expert on the Iraq and Afghanistan war efforts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "On the other hand, characterizing the problem in Afghanistan as driven by foreign fighters does not track with evidence from the ground."
In fact, the influence of events and conditions across the border in Pakistan is so crucial that the war is now essentially "an Afghanistan-Pakistan conflict," Mr. Cordesman says – not just the war in Afghanistan as it is commonly called.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) is a private, tax-exempt institution focusing on international public policy issues. Its research is nonpartisan and nonproprietary. CSIS does not take specific policy positions; accordingly, all views, positions, and conclusions expressed in these publications should be understood to be solely those of the authors.
