I’m not sure how clear the exit strategy is, having a goal is nice but what happens if that goal is not met by 7/2011?
Having a clear mission would be nice as well. I’m still in the “WTF are we still there” boat.
Right. Jon Stewart and J. Wellington Friedman (‘for a hamburger today I will gladly repay you in the next six months will be critical’) discussed this on the Daily Show tonight and Stewart kept framing this in terms of rebuilding the country. That would be hard enough, but it’s not rebuilding. I don’t know what could be done that would rise into positive action, rather than just delaying a more or less inevitable outcome. And then you get into how this might affect Pakistan. That’s not a heartening prospect either.
Not only does Obama not have to accept whatever advice the generals give him, he should not accept it. Generals are always going to think the military can handle everything, which is what you’d expect them to think. The president is expected to have a broader perspective, and this is not just a military matter. And yes, this is the road everybody expected him to go. I don’t mind that he took his time thinking about it. We’ve seen what happens when you do the opposite and figure everything will go the way you want it to and the details will take care of themselves.
His decision was delayed? What does that mean? He had no deadline to make a decison. He’s the boss here, not the employee. There wasn’t any due date. The decision took as long as it took to get it right. Any talk of “delay” is just partisan demagoguery. McChrystal was not entitled to an instant decision. He’s Obama’s bitch, Obama’s not his.
It’s a complete sham. He put lipstick on a pig by saying we’re sending in a bunch of troops, but not to worry, we’re exiting in 18 months. Everything will be just fine in 18 months. After 18 months, the Taliban will never come back. It’s self evident.
Leaving the timeline open is not a viable option. We can’t afford to stay there forever. I mean, we literally can’t financially afford it. We’ll give it a shot. if it doesn’t work, at least we tried, but there comes a time when you have to cut bait.
I’m left wondering (not for the first time) if Afghanistan has already been botched beyond repair due to neglect from 2002 onward. I’m not sure anything can fix that. Of course that doesn’t mean the goals there are not legit, but they may be out of reach regardless.
He didn’t say that.
I doubt very seriously if the only component of this decision was how many troops to send in next year. They also had to consider how and where those troops were to be deployed. I’m guessing that there was more than one opinion among Obama’s military advisors as to where those additional troops would go, so you have a lot of scenarios to consider already.
And you can’t just settle on a number and consider strategies with that many. Could we get the same result with 25,000 more troops? Would we be better off with 35,000? Could we get by with fewer if we used more technology?
Obama was not just picking a number of troops to hand to the commanders and say “Here, go nuts”. This was a whole specific strategy to put together, most of which we’ll never hear about since it’s, you know, military strategy. I don’t have any problem with that taking four months; hell, it took me two weeks to pick out a dishwasher.
Bull shit.
You think he said that? It it weren’t so tragic, I would say it is to laugh.
Exactly. A military guy is always going to say he can succeed. A true leader will cut thru all the BS and think about what we actually can or cannot do, and what is really in the best interest of the country. Not just thinking about how to “win” militarily.
Sorry, the image of Obama standing over a large Afghanistan map pushing troops around with a pointer like he was in a WWII movie is just not coming into focus
I have to say I’m not very sanguine about this. It seems the worst of both worlds…a split between business as usual and doing nothing. The president wants to wind down the war in Afghanistan…by deploying 30k more troops (less than his military advisers recommended)? And yet, he wants to have most of the combat forces out of Afghanistan by…August 2011? Less than 2 years? Seriously? That doesn’t sound very realistic to me, given the current situation there. Hell, I’m doubtful we’ll be able to get the troops out of Iraq in that time frame, and compared to Afghanistan, Iraq is the model of stability and strength wrt their army.
To me, this smacks of a middle of the road approach to this mess. Granted, I’m normally all about a middle of the road approach to things, but in a war it’s a good way to get hit by traffic coming from both directions. I think I’d have been happier with either a more committed military strategy (with a realistic long term view of this fucked up situation) along with some serious political muscle behind the creation of a real, viable government in Afghanistan, or a strategy that has us essentially letting the country go tits up, as it seems to be headed, and getting the majority of our regular forces out of there.
I’m starting to wonder if there was anything we every could have done, save completely destroy the country and rebuild it from the ground up. Definitely as fucked up as Bush et al left it, I don’t know that anything could be done to save the situation at this point. I think John Mace is on the right track…I think what we needed wasn’t more of the same (to me, this is exactly what Bush would have done had he still been president), but something…outside the box.
(And just to anticipate 'luci’s asking me what XT, God Emperor of the kingdom of America would do, I’d get us the fuck out of there, and Iraq too…but then, I’d be more interested is lounging on a beach, having scantily clad love muffins peeling me grapes and such, than foreign adventures in the ME or anywhere else).
-XT
Show me the part where he said everything would be fine in 18 months, or that the Taliban would would never return. Hell, he didn’t even say we would leave. The 18 months is the timeline for the temporary escalation (or “surge” as Rove re-labeled troop escalations), and the beginning of the draw down, not a drop dead date for leaving.
No, I said that.
And in your opinion, that would be what?
A political solution, at a guess. Military people see all problems as nails, and all solutions would then involve hammers…
-XT
“It was like that when I got there.” Seriously, though, destroy it, after what the country had already been through? How would you know which parts you’d destroyed?
I don’t know if anything was ever going to make a difference either, in terms of preventing it from becoming a terrorist zone again. When the war started, I was opposed to it because I thought it looked like a rash overreaction to September 11th. I don’t think that anymore but I don’t know if the goal can be achieved. And meanwhile stability in the region is definitely worse than it was a decade ago because now, you have weak governments and competing factions in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The political parts are what I was talking about…there was really not much left to destroy, otherwise. Most of the infrastructure, such as it was, was already pretty much toast.
Essentially, we (the various allies involved in this mess) needed to commit much heavier forces, and much more funding in the post-conquest phase…and we needed to impose some kind of medium term government on them. Something like the occupation governments in Germany or Japan post war.
Or we needed to stay out, and just bomb the shit out of AQ from the air, possibly send in SF teams, etc, etc. Take your pick…there are no right answers (or easy ones) in this game. What I can say though is that what Bush et al did, while initially militarily sound, was, in the long term, totally fucked up…and I don’t believe that the course Obama is setting atm is much better. Guess we’ll see.
-XT
I don’t think that’s true at all; I think when you task them with delivering a military strategy, they’ll give you one. McChrystal’s orders, AFICT, were to tell Obama how to achieve success in Afghanistan, not to rethink the entire geopolitical equation and decide whether we should stay there or bug out.
I’m sure, and I’m not faulting them for that. If you asked them to deliver a strategy for routing Al Qaeda and giving every person in Afghanistan breakfast in bed, they would probably tell you they can do it and come up with the steps they would take to do it. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. There are other elements to this aside from just the military strategy. The Afghan government needs to work somehow, for one thing, and the military isn’t going to make that happen.
I probably should have said “he should not accept that advice at face value.”
I noticed how little mention was made of Karzai and the “central government” in general. I think that’s subtly significant. We mean to connect with local tribal governments, with an eye to enabling them to resist Taliban coercion. At the very least, convince them that we are not their enemy. Narrow the territory.
As well, by increasing local security, offer a lure for current Taliban, an alternative. A home worth going back to. A glimmer of a future. Just put down the gun, and go home. Screw martyrdom, get a wife, make babies, herd goats or raise saffron.
Finally, when that is accomplished, and the troops are in place, conduct a pincer operation with Pakistan, they push from their side, we catch on “ours”. Victory. Temporary? Well, aren’t they all?
But I’m not sold. If anyone might have sold me, it would be him. I take his points well, I see why he believes what he does. As a pessimist, nothing makes me happier than being wrong. I seldom am.
This thing could work, but everything will have to click neatly into place. I trust this man’s integrity, and I trust his intelligence. But one of us is wrong, and I sure hope its me.