Afghanistan

[driveby]

From the beginning, the call to arms was highly uncertain. On Dec. 1, 2009, commander-in-chief Barack Obama orders 30,000 more Americans into battle in Afghanistan. But in the very next sentence, he announces that an American withdrawal will begin after 18 months.

 

Astonishing. A surge of troops — overall, Obama has tripled our Afghan force — with a declaration not of war, but of ambivalence. Nine months later, Marine Corps Commandant James Conway admitted that this decision was “probably giving our enemy sustenance.” This wasn’t conjecture, he insisted, but the stuff of intercepted Taliban communications testifying to their relief that they simply had to wait out the Americans.

 

What kind of commander in chief sends tens of thousands of troops to war while announcing in advance a fixed date for beginning their withdrawal? One who doesn’t have his heart in it. One who doesn’t really want to win but is making some kind of political gesture. One who thinks he has to be seen as trying but is preparing the ground — meaning, the political cover — for failure.

 

Until now, the above was just inference from the president’s public rhetoric. No longer. Now we have the private quotes. Bob Woodward’s book, Obama’s Wars, drawing on classified memos and interviews with scores of national-security officials, has Obama telling his advisers: “I want an exit strategy.” He tells the country publicly that Afghanistan is a “vital national interest,” but he tells his generals that he will not do the kind of patient institution-building that is the very essence of the counterinsurgency strategy that Generals McChrystal and Petraeus crafted and that he himself adopted.

 

Moreover, he must find an exit because “I can’t lose the whole Democratic party.” This admission is the most crushing of all.

 

First, isn’t this the party that in two consecutive presidential campaigns — John Kerry’s and then Obama’s — argued vociferously that Afghanistan was the good war, the right war, the war of necessity, the central front in the War on Terror? Now, after acceding to power and being given charge of that very war, Obama confides that he must retreat lest that very same party abandon him. What happened in the interim? Did it suddenly develop a faint heart? Or was the party disingenuous about the Afghan war all along, using it as a convenient club with which to attack George W. Bush over Iraq, while protecting Democrats from the charge of being reflexively antiwar?

 

 

Whatever the reason, is it not Obama’s job as president and party leader to bring the party with him? This is the man who made Berlin coo, America swoon, and the Nobel committee lose its mind. Yet he cannot get his own party to follow him on what he insists is a matter of vital national interest?

 

Did he even try? Obama spent endless hours cajoling and persuading individual members of Congress to garner every last vote for health-care reform. Has he done a fraction of that for Afghanistan — argued, pleaded, horse-traded, twisted even a single arm?

 

And what about persuading the country at large? Every war is arduous and requires continual presidential explication, inspiration, and encouragement. This has been true from Lincoln through FDR through Bush. Since announcing his Afghan surge, Obama’s only major speech that featured Afghanistan was an Oval Office address about America’s leaving Iraq — the Afghan part being sandwiched between that and a long-winded plea for his economic policies.

 

“He was looking for choices that would limit U.S. involvement and provide a way out,” writes Woodward. One can only conclude that Obama now thinks Afghanistan is a mistake. Maybe he thought so from the very beginning. More charitably and more likely, he is simply a foreign-policy novice who didn’t understand what this war was about until being given the authority and duty to conduct it — and then decided it was all a mistake.

 

Fair enough. But in that case, what is he doing escalating it?

 

Senator Kerry, now chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, asked many years ago: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” Perhaps Kerry should ask that of Obama.

 

“He is out of Afghanistan psychologically,” says Woodward of Obama. Well, he may be out, but the soldiers he ordered to Afghanistan are in.

 

Some will not come home.

 

Krauthammer

 

Lest you dismiss Krauthammer as just another Righty political hack columnist, here is essentially the same article by Eugene Robinson, a long time Obama butt smoocher;

 

WASHINGTON -- Could somebody please remind me just what it is that we're achieving in Afghanistan? Don't all speak at once. No, I mean what good things we're accomplishing. Anybody? Hello?

 

The more we learn about the war -- both from the battlefield and from the White House -- the more depressing it all becomes. The portrait that emerges is of a failing military campaign whose course is being determined by momentum, not by logic. Everyone seems to appreciate this fact, but no one is willing to stop the madness. So on we go.

 

For me, the most striking revelation from uber-journalist Bob Woodward's new book, "Obama's Wars," is the extent to which the officials who are planning and prosecuting this war recognize how unlikely it is to end well.

 

Begin with President Obama. He campaigned on the position that the United States should end the war in Iraq so that more attention and resources could be focused on Afghanistan, which he subsequently has called a "war of necessity." Once in office, he quickly approved an urgent Pentagon request for 21,000 additional troops. But before making any further commitments, he sensibly ordered a comprehensive review of the war's goals, strategy and prospects. Fine so far.

 

But then, according to Woodward's account, the president looked at the two major options that were being presented, decided they wouldn't work, and proceeded to devise a strategy of his own. The generals wanted 40,000 additional troops to pursue an all-out counterinsurgency program based on winning the good will and allegiance of the Afghan people. Skeptics, led by Vice President Biden, argued for a "hybrid" option -- essentially, a counterterrorism strategy of destroying the Taliban -- that would require just 20,000 added troops.

 

By that point, you will note, the issue had become how sharply to escalate the war -- not whether to escalate at all.

 

Obama was deeply concerned about the costs, both human and financial, of an open-ended military commitment. Dissatisfied with the way the Pentagon was trying to manipulate the discussion, the president took it on himself to author a six-page "terms sheet" that Woodward describes as a "lawyerly compromise." He capped the increase at 30,000, replacing the word "counterinsurgency" with the new mantra of "target, train and transfer," and decreed that the troops sent in this limited surge would begin to come home in July 2011. All this was supposed to eliminate any "wiggle room."

 

But the Pentagon wiggles better than the dancers at what is euphemistically called a "gentlemen's club." Almost immediately, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the brass began telling anyone who would listen that next July is just a date to begin a withdrawal -- perhaps of relatively few troops, and only if "conditions" allowed. Woodward quotes Gen. David Petraeus, Obama's commander in Afghanistan, as saying privately, "You have to recognize also that I don't think you win this war. ... This is the kind of fight we're in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids' lives."

 

Can anyone explain how that differs from the open-ended commitment that Obama claims to have rejected? I thought not.

 

This jumble of contradictions might make sense if we were accomplishing something. But the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai is as erratic and corrupt as ever, the Taliban remains robust and has expanded its sphere of operations, and even the most optimistic supporters of the war see whatever progress we have made as limited and fragile. Hawks criticize the president for setting his deadline -- telling the enemy, in effect, to just wait us out -- but if you assume that U.S. troops will ever leave, the specific date is irrelevant. It's the enemy's homeland, not ours.

 

But this war is only tangentially about Afghanistan. The real problem is nuclear-armed Pakistan, our supposed ally, which has played a double game -- accepting billions of dollars from the United States to fight terrorism, while at the same time giving clandestine advice and support to the Taliban and tolerating the presence of al-Qaeda's senior leadership. Pakistan's civilian government is weak, its military establishment calls the shots, and its national security focus is on India, not Afghanistan or the threat of international terrorism.

 

"We need to make clear to people that the cancer is in Pakistan," Obama said during his war strategy review, according to Woodward's book. But if the purpose of this war is really to influence events in Pakistan, we're not doing a very good job.

 

One last question: Isn't it time for another strategy review?

 

link

 

So, do the people (you know who you are) who hammered Bush over Iraq and Afghanistan want to dispute the bolded paragraph (and specifically the last sentence) in Krauthammers piece now?

[moneymakers]

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/201..._of_change.html

 

Must have patience my little drive by

Edited October 1, 2010 by moneymakers

[evil_gop_liars]

Thanks Tweedledee and Tweedledum.