oBut letAEs face it: Two years ago, what did he know about Afghanistan?o The former top national security aide is no
soft-liner and thinks it would be a disaster to withdraw from Afghanistan or set deadlines for getting out.
Why risk the 'achievements of the regime' for the sake of the fuzzy long-term advantages advocated by the
soft-liners?"(10) What is paradoxical in this context is that Houari Boumediene appeared like a
soft-liner because the so-called "liberals" in the ruling bloc, despite their opposition to the Charter, resisted any weakening of the bloc.
Using assistance as negative leverage has been debated ad nauseam in Washington but US government deliberations on this and the larger Pakistan question have tended to be split between the hardliners and
soft-liners who advocated a carrots-first approach.
The first was becoming known as the Hard-Liners on Berlin and while the other had been disparagingly labeled by the hawks in the room as the SLOBs, or the
Soft-Liners on Berlin.
Diplomatic experts say North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, too, has walked a tight rope between military hard-liners and civilian
soft-liners. We have always wondered who or which group is President Lee's main architect in mapping out the inter-Korean relationship.
Nelson Rockefeller signed into law what he called "the toughest antidrug program in the nation" and then congratulated himself and the legislators who stood fast "against this strange alliance of vested establishment interests, political opportunists and misguided
soft-liners who joined forces and tried unsuccessfully to stop this program." Pushed by reporters to identify this "strange alliance," the governor included the state's district attorneys and some police officials as having opposed the new laws.
Certainly recent policy initiatives by the US government--which has its hard- and
soft-liners, just as did the Truman Administration at the start of the Cold War--seem remarkably similar to recommendations in After Jihad, and may signal the rise of more pragmatic and long-term policies than simply making war.
This struggle may be fought between 'hard-liners' and '
soft-liners,' where 'hard-liners' are constituted by those who struggle for the perpetuation of some kind of authoritarian rule, while '
soft-liners' also are represented in the authoritarian power structure but increasingly come to embrace the idea that legitimacy must be sought through elections.
Writers have every reason to fear and despise religion -- which perennially fears and despises them -- but there was a peculiar passivity, indeed a paralysis of imagination, in this group's willingness to leave the defining process entirely to the hard-liners (and, by implication, to the earnest and incurably sloganeering efforts of the liberal
soft-liners).
In regard to negotiations to end apartheid, there is the familiar notion of hard-liners and
soft-liners. In the South African case, hard-liners opposed to dismantling apartheid were associated with working-class Afrikaners and white state employees.
There was a split in nicaragua in the recent election campaign, but it was not between Sandinista hard-liners and
soft-liners. The split was between those in the rightist opposition who are willing to live with the idea of majority rule and those who are not.