The Independent View

Yes, Afghanistan is now Obama’s War. It was his since inau­gu­ra­tion but make no mis­take, from last night’s speech, it is clearly his and we can no longer blame Bush for the mess. Obama has now cre­ated the recipe for his own disaster:

• First, the mil­i­tary asked for as much as 60,000 troops, Obama gives them half, and
• Sec­ond, while Obama says and repeats that his goal is “defined as dis­rupt­ing, dis­man­tling, and defeat­ing al Qaeda and its extrem­ist allies”, he spends more time Viet­namiz­ing the war with talk of how he’s going to shift the effort (and respon­si­bil­ity of achiev­ing his goal) to the Karzai’s hap­less and cor­rupt gov­ern­ment. As he clearly states “these addi­tion­alAmer­i­can and inter­na­tional troops will allow us to accel­er­ate hand­ing over respon­si­bil­ity to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the trans­fer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011.”

What does this mean?

Well, Obama spelled that out:

These are the three core ele­ments of our strat­egy: a mil­i­tary effort to cre­ate the con­di­tions for a tran­si­tion; a civil­ian surge that rein­forces pos­i­tive action; and an effec­tive part­ner­ship with Pakistan.

Unfor­tu­nately, Obama never said our goal is to win the war we are now in against the Tal­iban and Al-​Qaeda. He seems only inter­ested in coun­ter­ing them. Does he expect them to wither away as he pulls US troops out? Espe­cially as he’s made clear else­where through his spokesman Gibbs that he wants all the troops out by Jan­u­ary 2013.

This is a war of 1,000 cuts. Karzai barely con­trols Kabul, the Tal­iban have the run of the rest of the rest of the coun­try, and in the mid­dle are US troops with a half-​hearted mis­sion. Yes, there are small rep­re­sen­ta­tive con­tin­gents British, Ger­man, and other troops but they have even less role that Karzai. It is a war of 1,000 cuts because what is pre­sented is a win by attri­tion for the Tal­iban as noth­ing in Obama’s plans spell out a strat­egy for the US to win the war – no one is going to sur­ren­der, except us in our win­less depar­ture. At the end of the war the Afghani gov­ern­ment may still con­trol Kabul but the Tal­iban will very likely still have the run of the rest of the coun­try. Us, we’ll have brought home tens of thou­sands of US troops on stretch­ers or in body bags.

McCain report­edly directly chal­lenged Obama on his strat­egy in a White House meet­ing before his speech. Sarah Palin, the defacto voice of the Repub­li­can Party, writes to note that Obama has come a long ways in respond­ing to her and other’s calls to pro­vide the nec­es­sary resources to achieve our goals in Afghanistan. She clearly sees Obama’s move as a start­ing point and, while appre­ci­at­ing it, states the obvi­ous in her blog:

…fewer troops mean assum­ing more risk. Talk of an exit date also risks send­ing the wrong mes­sage. We should be in Afghanistan to win, not to set a timetable for with­drawal that sig­nals a lack of resolve to our friends, and lets our ene­mies believe they can wait us out.

Palin doesn’t rec­on­cile her inter­pre­ta­tion of win with Obama’s strat­egy to instead with­draw but she nev­er­the­less concludes:

As long as we’re in to win, and as long as troop level deci­sions are based on con­di­tions on the ground and the advice of our mil­i­tary com­man­ders, I sup­port Pres­i­dent Obama’s decision.

I am not a politi­cian and not as gra­cious. Obama can­not sit on the fence in mat­ters of war. If his goals are to win a war – in this case to rout the Tal­iban and Al-​Qaeda – he should so state and com­mit the troops and resources nec­es­sary to do so. If, as it instead appears, he wants to sim­ply con­tain them to allow a future US with­draw, then he should explain why this serves America’s inter­ests and why any fur­ther loss of Amer­i­can blood is not in vain.

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