kenberg, on Oct 18 2009, 12:00 PM, said:
Last year, during the campaign, I was not at all supportive of what I thought to be the very glib description of Iraq as a war of choice, Afghanistan as a war of necessity.
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My not very informed guess is that it is (a.) important and (b.) hopeless.
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However misguided LBJ may have been about Viet Nam, no one I know doubts that he thought it was of critical importance.
I did not like the phrase "war of necessity" either, and Obama will clearly be hurt politically for using it no matter what he does now. If the war in Afghanistan is indeed "(a.) important and (b.) hopeless" as I too suspect, Obama has to figure out what to do -- and this is a very serious business.
We know now that LBJ realized early on that the war in Vietnam was hopeless, despite the fact that US generals kept telling him that one more "surge" would carry the day. But LBJ did not want to be the president who "lost Vietnam to the communists," so he kept escalating and escalating. I knew young soldiers who died because of what LBJ did then, and I know families devastated by those losses, and I suspect that you do too.
If LBJ had pulled out of Vietnam when he realized that the war was hopeless, he most certainly would have been pilloried as the president who lost Vietnam to the communists. But a lot fewer people would have been killed and maimed. And if Obama does not give General McChrystal 40,000 more soldiers now, he'll be pilloried as the president who lost Afghanistan to the Taliban. We know that and he knows that.
General McChrystal has been outspoken about the stupidity of the strategy that was employed for eight years in Afghanistan, particularly the killing of civilians we depend upon for support. He's working hard to reverse that, but a lot of damage has already been done. He says he needs 40,000 soldiers soon to avert a military defeat at the hands of the Taliban. It would not surprise me to learn that he'll need many more "surges" of the same size or larger in the future.
McCain urged Obama to authorize McChrystal's request right away (although McCain said during the campaign that the US could "muddle through" in Afghanistan as things stood). And, of course, the "real men don't think things through" crowd is also yelling at Obama to authorize those troops immediately.
But I'm glad that Obama is taking the time to figure this out. He needs to settle upon a reasonable objective and on a concrete plan to achieve that objective. That's what was missing before, and is why we are in such a bad position now.
I've mentioned in the past that I voted for McCain in the primary but for Obama in the general election. The way the two men have reacted to McChrystal's request for 40,000 more soldiers reinforces my belief that I made the right choice.
I did read with interest the article you referenced in the Washington Post:
Europe's angst over Afghanistan
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It's fair to say that Obama has tried harder than Bush to coordinate policy with U.S. allies. But his deliberations on Afghanistan are demonstrating how some fundamentals of being a superpower never really change.
For example, when you're supplying 70 percent of the troops for a war and doing 90 percent of the fighting, your allies may just have to cool their heels while you decide whether to escalate, hold steady or blow up your strategy.
And while they wait, they will stew.
If this war is really important to Europe, they'll be ready to pony up a lot more soldiers as well.
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It's hard for European leaders to argue that Obama should send the 40,000 or more reinforcements that McChrystal is seeking, since they will be accompanied, at best, by only 2,000 to 3,000 more Europeans. So they tend to focus on the other half of the equation: why the West cannot give up on the effort to stabilize Afghanistan under a decent government.
Or not.
The growth of wisdom may be gauged exactly by the diminution of ill temper. — Friedrich Nietzsche
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell. — Bertrand Russell