Posted on 09/06/2009 11:10:49 AM PDT by Schnucki
The allied commander wants greater effort, but the war looks ever more likely to poison Barack Obama’s presidency
Entertaining a group of US historians at the White House this summer, President Barack Obama revealed that he was beginning to worry about Afghanistan and the prospect that his ambitious domestic agenda would come to be overshadowed by an unpopular and unwinnable war.
It was an odd moment for Obama to be preoccupied by foreign policy – he was in the middle of a ferocious congressional battle over healthcare reforms – yet his concern turned out to be prescient.
As he spends his Labor Day holiday weekend at the Camp David retreat in Maryland, Afghanistan is confronting him with what may prove the defining decision of his presidency. “It’s an issue he understands could be a danger to his administration,” said one of the historians who attended the presidential dinner.
The completion of a comprehensive strategy review by General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of US and other Nato forces in Afghanistan, has brought to boiling point a long-simmering stew of military, diplomatic and political conflicts over America’s faltering mission in Kabul.
Cracks are appearing in administration ranks as Taliban attacks, civilian casualties, allegations of fraudulent elections and plummeting US public support raise questions about what Obama insists is a “necessary war”.
Joseph Biden, the vice-president, has expressed public doubts about a new US military build-up in Afghanistan, mainly on the grounds that it might destabilise Pakistan, whose nuclear arsenal makes it a more pressing US concern.
Robert Gates, the Pentagon chief who has served both Obama and George W Bush, said last week the US effort in Kabul was “only now beginning”. Yet earlier this year he said he was “very sceptical” about increasing troop levels beyond the 68,000 due to be
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
Obama reminds me of that famous Roman fiddle player ... Nero.
It is hard to be objective when up to one’s ass in alligators.
Don’t they mean 0bama RATTLES like the snake that he is.
“Entertaining a group of US historians” Let Me Guess Rev Wright, Ayres and friends ?
Its funny. Does the Taliban sit around and wonder if this war is going to “poison” their legacy? Do they sit around and worry if its a quagmire?
They get up every day and do what they do.
We have to get up every day and make sure they die doing it, and preferably somewhere out in the hinterlands. And build an Afghan Army capable of manning the frontiers. That probably means hiring or recruiting the warlords into the government, with green beret advisors, and putting Afghans out into the field with green beret advisors. And don’t get into any big hurry.
Then over time reaching into Waziristan and doing the same thing; hiring or recruiting the sheiks similar to what was done in Iraq. As that process unfolds it will become obvious when its time to start pulling back. You won’t need to pick a date on a calendar. It might not be during O’s presidency, it might be during the next guy’s administration. It doesn’t matter. No one looks to win the war on crime on a date certain, you just keep the wolves at bay. Its the same thing here. Victory comes when the local forces can do it without you.
Gates is a good man for the job.
Remember Somalia?
Gates is far better at Sec Def than was Clinton’s Les Aspin.
Obama can’t even clarify his position on icecream - no kidding he’s rattled.
The real problem is, he want’s to cut and run from the middle east. But the public believes, correctly, that Iraq and Afghanistan were being won when Bush left office. So cutting and running now makes Bambi look like, well, Bambi.
OTOH, if he keeps things pretty much the same, the Americar bleeding will increase and last a long time. That is the McNamara approach to Afghanistan.
OTOH, if he escalates, his supporters will turn on him viciously. His supporters want a loss and surrender in the middle east. That is the Bush/Nixon approach to Afghanistan.
I think in his heart of hearts, Bambi agrees with the nutroots. But, unlike his nutroots, he understands the political fallout of having the dems deliberately lose yet another war. Remember LBJ and Vietnam and the fallout when the dems cut off aid to the South? They were justifiably stuck with a surrender monkey label for decades.
I think what we will see is a very strong PR campaign(6-12 months in duration), endlessly flacked by the Old Media, to convince the public not to believe their lyin’ eyes and to believe instead that both wars were in terrible shape when Bush left office, followed of course by retreat and surrender.
Right and in the case of Afghanistan he wanted a surge during the campaign. He also said all this before he became president.
"John McCain likes to say that he’ll follow bin Laden to the Gates of Hell - but he won’t even go to the cave where he lives."
"We will kill bin Laden; we will crush Al Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority."
"They are now raiding our troops in Afghanistan, destabilizing the situation. They're stronger now than at any time since 2001. And that's why I think it's so important for us to reverse course, because that's the central front on terrorism."
Yes, and let’s not let any of our liberal friends forget that both Obama and Hillary! called Afghanistan “the good war”, and “the war we had to fight”. Obama was even going to invade Pakistan to pursue the Taliban.
They want desperately to blame Afghanistan on Bush and weasel out of it but they were all behind this war from day one.
Obama either has to prosecute the war he was in favor of or alienate the howling mobs on the left.
Obama should ask for Joe “Stand Up Chuck” Biden’s opinion and do the opposite, since Biden has been wrong about foreign policy for 30 years.
Sure the dumbasses do.
Still blame Bush.
The poser punk is going to release logs of ?White House visitors, well some of them.
At least the ones that are not ashamed of.
“Right and in the case of Afghanistan he wanted a surge during the campaign. He also said all this before he became president.”
What lefties say about wars and what they do are two different things. Liberals are always in favor of being tough in the war that is NOT currently hot—remember all the bloviating about “we should be invading NK and Iran, not Iraq” during the Iraq war buildup. Then, when it get’s hot, they change their stripes.
Iran almost had a revolution and Obama sided with the mullahs. And the left as a whole would turn red and their heads blow up if we so much as actually looked at NK in an angry fashion and pretended we were going to do something mean.
They need some way to sound tough in foreign policy. Being tough about the war we are NOT fighting is one of their time approved methods of acting tough.
The Taliban knows Obama is a weak loser, so as soon as he was elected they saw victory. In fact, Obama may lose Afghanistan AND Iraq.
The poser punk is going to release logs of ?White House visitors, well some of them.
At least the ones that are not ashamed of.
I can only imagine the Pinko Dregs that will be on that list.
My momma would be better at SECDEF than Aspin.
My gripe with Gates is that he is presiding over yet another procurement holiday. We will not fight brush wars forever.
Obama and his band of amateur idiots (including Gates) have the tiger now and they have no clue as to what to do.
you are too generous.
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