Recently, Dick Cheney accused President Obama of "dithering" on Afghanistan. As expected, the right has pounced on this and fallen back into the "Obama is weak, they's a comin', he'll encourage terrorists to attack us" meme. Many have said that the president should listen to Generals MacChyrstal and Patraeus and approve the troop surge immediately.
The only problem with this opinion is that's not what General Patraeus has said. From the Defense Department web site.
n Iraq, getting the right strategy was just as important as the surge in personnel, the general said. “The real key in Iraq was the surge of ideas, not just the surge of troops,” Petraeus said. “Yes, the 30,000 additional troops that ended up being deployed during the surge enabled us to … implement time-honored counterinsurgency concepts more effectively and more rapidly than we could have.”
Multinational forces began living in the communities. They began protecting the people and securing their neighborhoods. “You cannot commute to the fight,” Petraeus said, and the command built 77 stations for coalition forces in Baghdad alone.
As attention shifts to Afghanistan, Petraeus said, people must remember that Afghanistan is not Iraq.
“All counterinsurgencies are local,” he explained. “You have to recognize the need for a truly nuanced and granular appreciation for local circumstances.”
Americans going to the country must understand the local customs and culture and the local power structures. “We are trying to help Afghanistan re-establish traditional ruling structures: the traditional [religious leaders], the traditional tribal leaders, who in many areas have been pushed aside, or killed, or run off by the Taliban or the more extreme leaders,” he said.
Wait, what? General Patraeus has said that it's a good thing to wait and get it right? Hmm, I wonder how long it will take for the base to call him General "Betray Us."
5 comments:
The base already did - the Democratic base. But that one doesn't count does it.
Gawd you are such a dipshit some times.
I really just don't understand the pleasure of wanking off to partisanship.
maureen dowd said today that obama is dithering as well.
Who cares what she thinks?
In the first place, Obama has already increased the number of troops in Afghanistan since he took office. Second, any drastic increase in the number of troops will take many months to implement. The military is stretched mighty thin now. Exactly where are we going to get all these extra troops? So taking two or three months to figure out what to do for the next ten years is not "dithering."
Bush & Co. assumed that Saddam was behind 9/11. Yet it took until April, 2003 for Bush to actually invade Iraq. He "dithered" for a year and a half before invading a country that had no WMDs and wasn't involved in 9/11. Had he dithered another year and finished the war in Afghanistan instead of wasting thousands of lives and a trillion dollars in Iraq, we wouldn't be having this discussion now.
Instead, the Taliban and Al Qaeda are now seriously threatening to overthrow the Pakistani government, which has nuclear weapons.
Obama has been in office for 10 months. McChrystal opened his yap about two months ago. Bush first invaded Afghanistan in 2001, with insufficient troops. He let bin Laden escape into Pakistan by not going in with enough force, completely ignoring the Powell doctrine. They had SEVEN YEARS to get Afghanistan right, and now they accuse Obama of "dithering."
It's appalling to hear Cheney criticizing Obama for Bush's mistakes. But that's par for the course. The Republicans have utterly no shame. It's all just a game to them, more machinations for the next election cycle. They don't give a damn about the lives of the 40,000 soldiers who they want to throw into the meatgrinder of Afghanistan.
Remember that the Soviets spent 10 years fighting in Afghanistan against Taliban and Al Qaeda proxies we helped fund. It's arguable that the war was a major contributing factor to the downfall of the Soviet Union. Do we really want to blindly follow in their footsteps?
The real reason the "Surge" worked in Iraq was because we did a 180 turn on the Sunni insurgents (Saddam's supporters). Originally Cheney and Rumsfeld vowed to kill them all, to make sure that everyone who had killed Americans would be tried and executed. Then Bush finally conceded to reality and decided to work with them, cutting deals with former insurgents who had American blood on their hands.
McChrystal is talking about pretty much the same kind of thing now in Afghanistan: put more troops in to protect civilians, and cutting a deal with the Taliban to get at Al Qaeda and bin Laden. Don't you think it's wise to closely examine such a plan to make sure it'll work? The Afghan election also injected great uncertainty into the process; a large part of the problem is Karzai and his warlord/druglord pals.
The brutal truth about invading other countries is that a democracy can never "win" a war of aggression. We could win WWII because Germany and Japan were the aggressors. You cannot occupy another country forever, or kill everyone you don't like, or impose your religion and ideals on people who refuse them and still remain a force for freedom and democracy. It took Bush four years to figure that out in Iraq at the cost of thousands of American lives, and inflicting untold physical and emotional agony on the rest of our troops.
Instead, the Taliban and Al Qaeda are now seriously threatening to overthrow the Pakistani government, which has nuclear weapons.
Someone else mentioned this to me, and it did give me pause. I am generally against the Afghanistan effort as it has been conducted (and is likely to be); to mash-up Gertrude Stein and a neo-con, there is no [liberal democracy] there there.
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