United Liberty
Conservatives, please listen to George Will
Tue, 12/08/2009 - 12:00pm | posted by Jason Pye
George Will predicts President Obama’s strategy for Afghanistan will fail:
[A]fter 11 months of graceless disparagements of the 43rd president, the 44th acts as though he is the first president whose predecessor bequeathed a problematic world. And Obama’s second new Afghanistan policy in less than nine months strikingly resembles his predecessor’s plan for Iraq, which was: As Iraq’s security forces stand up, U.S. forces will stand down.
Having vowed to “finish the job,” Obama revealed Tuesday that he thinks the job in Afghanistan is to get out of Afghanistan. This is an unserious policy.
Obama’s surge will bring to 51,000 his Afghanistan escalation since March. Supposedly this will buy time for Afghan forces to become adequate. But it is not intended to buy much time: Although the war is in its 98th month, Obama’s “Mission Accomplished” banner will be unfurled 19 months from now — when Afghanistan’s security forces supposedly will be self-sufficient. He must know this will not happen.
Forget the “surge,” we lost Afghanistan the moment we made a decision to engage in War in Iraq, and Will has written about the need to leave that country as well.
Obama is asking for more problems with this strategy, but unfortunately, what conservatives don’t realize is that George W. Bush lost this war, not his successor.
I thought Obama committing to a hard withdrawal date was tactically stupid. But I agree with you in the sense that we need to define what winning means.
To me, winning is not a situation where we occupy a country for years on end: it should mean that we establish a stable government that can defend itself and leave.
I’m not totally certain we’ve lost the war in Afghanistan yet but the hard withdrawal date was pretty damning to our chances of making the country stable and out of the hands of the warlords and the Taliban. I fear we may be losing the battle for the hearts and minds of the Afghans with this strategy.
From Obama’s perspective, I think this war is just a distraction for him in terms of sapping resources and time from his radical and dangerous domestic agenda and anything he can do to push resources back into that would be to his advantage.
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