So, we elected a president who promised a withdrawal from Iraq that he, or the generals who tell him what to do, is now further delaying. And, of course, the timetable he's now delaying was already a far cry from what he had promised as a candidate.
What are we to think? That may be sad news, but what could we have done differently? Surely it would have been worse to elect a president who did not promise to withdraw, right?
We've been waiting for Obama to make his decision on what to do with troops going into Afghanistan to attack Al Qaida (who aren't in Afghanistan any more) after the rerun of the election which was proven to be fraudulent and allowed Karzai to win.
Whew.
I'm really sick of our playing games in the world. With Karzai's brother accused of being a top Heroin Chief, with General McChrystal calling for more troops (while being criticized for his dealings with the Pat Tillman controversy), with a Civil War going on amid the Afghans that WE CANNOT CORRECT (just ask the Russians)... we are perceived as Occupiers and we should get out.
According to the source, Abdullah will likely announce this weekend that he will boycott the runoff presidential election slated for November 7, a runoff that had been scheduled after intense diplomatic arm twisting by the United States. [emphasis mine]
One hopes a CNN reporter simply failed to choose his/her words carefully and meant instead "drop out of" the race, because if Abdullah is going so far as to boycott the race, Afghanistan could become a much more dangerous place than it is already. Recall that earlier this year, Abdullah supporters were promising protests "with Kalashnakovs" if he simply lost in a fair vote, and, as if to prove their point, reports indicated a frightening flow of weapons toward Abdullah's political base. Now we're potentially talking about him urging people not to participate and declaring the entire runoff process illegitimate.
Kerry proceeds from a nonsensical definition of success:
I define success as the ability to empower and transfer responsibility to Afghans as rapidly as possible and achieve a sufficient level of stability to ensure that we can leave behind an Afghanistan that is not controlled by Al Qaeda or the Taliban.
Having the "ability" to do something is not success. Saying you're going to do something "as rapidly as possible" tells you nothing about how quickly you will do it. What, you think there's a plausible future where the president tells the American people that he screwed around a bit instead of getting Afghanistan done as "rapidly as possible?" Sloppy definitions make poor policy, and that's what we get from the rest of the speech. For example, take this goofy piece of self-contradiction:
Second, we simply don't have enough troops or resources to launch a broad, nationwide counterinsurgency campaign. But importantly, nor do we need to.
We all see the appeal of a limited counterterrorism mission- and no doubt it is part of the endgame. But I don't think we're there yet. A narrow mission that cedes half the country to the Taliban could lead to civil war and put Pakistan at risk.
What a mess. We don't have enough troop "for a broad, nationwide counterinsurgency," but we can't cede "half the country to the Taliban" without risking civil war. Following his warning about the dangers of ceding "half the country," Kerry calls for "narrowly focused" counterinsurgency operations in less than 40 percent of the country.
The U.S. is pinwheeling its arms on the edge of a very deep abyss in Afghanistan. In a Nixon-like display of corruption and paranoia, Hamid Karzai and his cronies, who would likely have won a legitimate election, engaged in such widespread vote fraud that Afghanistan likely faces either renewed civil conflict or a constitutional death spiral. These factors render General Stanley McChrystal's strategic assessment, which refers to its own "most important component" as "a strong partnership with the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (GIRoA) that will build the capacity needed to provide Afghanistan with a stable future," myopic in the extreme. In this context, a review that includes such useless prescriptions as "Promote a more capable, accountable, and effective government in Afghanistan that serves the Afghan people," shows how far into fantasy land U.S. "strategic thinking" has strayed.
Simply put, the political is killing us in Afghanistan. The self-inflicted wounds in the political arena we've bestowed upon ourselves since 2002 may be irreversible and terminal. One thing is certain: if the president can't break out out of the imaginary Afghanistan his advisers are creating for him, we are dead, and we won't be the only ones.
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