Taliban Kills, Obama Appeases
Yesterday morning in Kabul, a sports utility vehicle traveling on a busy commercial street detonated explosives hidden in the car as it approached the Indian Embassy. The suicide bomber killed 17 people and three Indian paramilitary guards were wounded by shrapnel. Hours later, the Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack and specified that the Indians were the target.
The Taliban's suicide attack on India, who was also attacked by the Pakistan-based, al Qaeda-sympathizing Lashkar-e-Tayyiba in Mumbai this past November, comes at the same time that President Barack Obama is trying to convince the American people that the Taliban is not a threat that merits the resources necessary to defeat it.
This was not always the Obama administration's view. Just this past March, when announcing his New Strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Obama explained: "Multiple intelligence estimates have warned that al Qaeda is actively planning attacks on the United States homeland from its safe haven in Pakistan. And if the Afghan government falls to the Taliban — or allows al Qaeda to go unchallenged — that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can."
The White Paper produced by the White House at the time also concluded that preventing al-Qaeda's return to Afghanistan would require "executing and resourcing an integrated civilian-military counterinsurgency strategy." As the Washington Post reported yesterday senior military commanders understood that this sentence meant U.S. and NATO forces would have to change focus from killing insurgents to a full out counterinsurgency effort. The military knew that this would almost certainly need more boots on the ground. But, according to the Post, the civilians in the Obama administration thought they could get away with protecting America on the cheap:
"It was easy to say, 'Hey, I support COIN,' because nobody had done the assessment of what it would really take, and nobody had thought through whether we want to do what it takes," said one senior civilian administration official who participated in the review, using the shorthand for counterinsurgency.
But when Gen. Stanley McChrystal returned with a tactical battle plan that requires an additional 40,000 U.S. troops on top of the 68,000 who are already there, the Obama administration began furiously backtracking. Now that the cost of defeating the Taliban is higher than the civilians in the Obama administration originally thought, all of a sudden President Obama sees "a role for Taliban in Afghanistan's future."
Worse Than Chamberlain
If power in America continues to move away from the people, [former House Speaker Newt] Gingrich says that the country risks "actually eliminating the uniqueness that has made America an exceptional nation. You begin drift into a world where nothing is stable."
"The modern Left is essentially proto-totalitarian," says Gingrich. President Obama, he says, is "an authentic representative of the intelligentsia. I think he likes Reveille for Radicals for a reason; he likes William Ayers for a reason. He didn't notice 20 years of sermons for a reason."
But is Obama that different from liberals like George McGovern? "Oh, yeah," says Gingrich. "My sense is with McGovern, unequivocally, that he was a man from a different world. McGovern was a man who had grown up in pre-World War II America. And he grew up in South Dakota. Obama really grew up in the world of the modern American intelligentsia — he is a person of the left. The minute you accept that, you understand almost everything."
Obama, Gingrich adds, "is a radical in the sense that the victory of those values would mean the end of American civilization as we know it." President Reagan, in contrast, he says, "was a radical within the American tradition. He was almost like the Jacksonian uprising against the establishment. Reagan represented a fundamental break with the dominant system of government for the last 60 years. He didn't quite pull it off. He managed to defeat the Soviet Empire and managed to renew the energy of entrepreneurial America, but he did not in fact change the underlying crisis."
In 2008, Americans, says Gingrich, "were voting for the end of Bush. They were voting to have no taxes raised on anybody making under $250,000 and they were voting for a tax cut for 95 percent of the American people. Go back and read what Obama campaigned on. This is a con job on the scale of Madoff." . . .
Looking to Afghanistan, Gingrich says "the real underlying challenge is that this is a much bigger problem than people understand. You can pull out of Afghanistan, and then what? You want to pull out of Pakistan? Fine. And then what? We pulled out of Somalia, and now we have pirates. You think these guys are going away? Or, do you think that this will become a bigger problem? It's like dealing with Iran. The last few weeks have been worse than Chamberlain. This is Baldwin in 1935, just willfully blind because he didn't want to tell the British people the truth because it would offend them."
Barack Obama's Leftist appeasement policies will come back to haunt us before long, I think. While I'm fine with him taking every bit of the political heat he deserves -- though I'm certain his propaganda queens in the media will do their best to deflect it -- the problem lies in the fact that this heat will likely take the form of death and destruction on the American people. That is something I find as reprehensible as it is unacceptable, and that's why I hope Barack Obama fails.
There's my two cents.
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