Failing And Surrender In Afghanistan

You probably remember all of those fiery campaign accusations from Barack Obama about how Iraq was a distraction from the 'necessary war' in Afghanistan, and how George W. Bush hadn't put enough troops into Afghanistan, and how Obama would correct those problems once he took office. You probably also remember how Gen. McChrystal -- the man Obama himself appointed to the Afghanistan post -- requested more troops back in August.

Anyway, while American troops were dying in record numbers there, the 'necessary war' took a back seat to even more critical things (like golf) for almost four months.

But you'd never know that by listening to Obama's laughable spokesman:

Q: Mr. Gibbs, good morning. Why did it take so long to make this decision?

GIBBS: Well look, Harry, I think that what's been done in this process is somewhat unprecedented on the issue of Afghanistan. I think everybody involved really worked hard with the President to make policy better than it would have been had we announced it after only a week. I think everybody involved made this policy stronger. And I think the American people can be proud of both the process and the decision that the President will announce tonight.

[...]

Q: Al Qaida really isn't much of a presence in Afghanistan anymore anyhow, so why not chase them into Pakistan or into the Horn of Africa?

GIBBS: Well, look. I think this Administration has taken the fight to Al Qaida unlike any that we've ever seen.

Is this guy for real? I'm not sure whether I'm going to laugh or cry at this.

Now Obama is going go on TV and announce his big plan (this is the second one...the first was in March, before he changed his mind). He is expected to add around 30,000 more troops despite the fact that his general asked for 40,000. Of course, this is going to be problematic for his base, so it is likely that he'll blame the whole thing on Bush and hope that they're so blindly angry with Bush that they forget everything else. We'll see how it plays out, but the bottom line is that he is using political ends to dictate his war policy, and that can't possibly end well - he campaigned on winning Afghanistan rather than Iraq in order to tap the anti-Iraq sentiment at the time. Now, however, he can't possibly win in Afghanistan without angering his own base. Ah, how the political winds change!

The likely outcome is that he'll offer a lame attempt to support the troops while planning a 'withdrawal'. And what exactly what it will look like to our enemies? A surrender, if they're just patient enough to wait us out.

Dick Cheney responds:

“I begin to get nervous when I see the commander in chief making decisions apparently for what I would describe as small ‘p’ political reasons, where he’s trying to balance off different competing groups in society,” Cheney said.

“Every time he delays, defers, debates, changes his position, it begins to raise questions: Is the commander in chief really behind what they’ve been asked to do?”

And unfortunately, the stakes of this war are very, very high:

Failure to achieve these goals is not an option, for it would be a direct threat to our national well-being. That’s not theory; it’s historical fact. We’ve already walked away from Afghanistan once, in the early 1990s, thinking that what happened there couldn’t possibly hurt us here. We were wrong.

The alternative to victory in Afghanistan is a return to chaos and, quite possibly, genocide. Al-Qaeda and its local Taliban enablers would immediately fill the ensuing power vacuum, turning that benighted land into an apocalyptic failed state. This would recreate the exact conditions that produced the 9/11 attacks.

Only this time, things could be worse. We could witness a regional conflagration that quickly turned nuclear and went global. Afghanistan borders on Pakistan, a nuclear nation with many Taliban sympathizers (especially among its ethnic Pashtuns).

A Taliban-dominated Afghanistan could easily inject further instability in Pakistan, strengthening extremist forces in the region that also threaten India. The likelihood of war between India and Pakistan — a war that could potentially go nuclear — would rise significantly. Remember, these two countries have already fought three wars since the partition of British India in 1947, and enmity between the two still abounds.

Incidentally, Obama and Biden have been wrong about pretty much everything about Afghanistan for a long time. Also, Obama has also made some other wonderful statements about the war in Afghanistan, like how he thinks the Taliban should be part of the permanent government and that there is no military solution in Afghanistan.

What a winner. This is yet another reason why he's a danger to our nation.

There's my two cents.


Related reading:
John Kerry: I was for more troops in Tora Bora while I was against it