I do believe President Obama should have accepted General McChrystal’s resignation, and I agree with the near universal assessment on the right that there can be no better replacement than General David Petraeus. However, that does not mean I am more confident about the fate of Afghanistan today than I was yesterday. The reason is simple: President Obama.
Amidst the praise for General Petraeus – which he certainly earned from his performance in Iraq – we have almost entirely forgotten the importance of the civilian who appointed him, as if having Petraeus as the military commander makes the president a better Commander-in-Chief. It doesn’t.
Lest we forget, when Petraeus was commander in the Iraq theatre, then-President Bush had his back every step of the way, and he set the tone for everyone else in his Administration: the Vice President, the Secretary of Defense, other civilian appointees, etc. Even Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who couldn’t have agreed with the general every second of every day, kept his contentions (and attempts to resolve them) private.
Contrast that with Obama’s treatment of McChrystal, who was not only appointed by Obama but was on the president’s side politically (no one knows to this day what Petraeus’ political affiliations are): civilians from Vice President Biden on down could and did brief against the general’s strategy – even though it was supposed to be the president’s, too.
Nearly everyone assumes Obama et al will avoid that sort of thing with Petraeus.
I have my doubts.
The only thing we knew about President Bush’s view on the WBK War was that he wanted it won. The only thing we knew about President Obama’s view on the WBK War is that he wants it over. That’s not the same thing, as I fear Petraeus is soon to discover.
Consider the President’s own words (SF Headlines Examiner):
So make no mistake: We have a clear goal. We are going to break the Taliban’s momentum. We are going to build Afghan capacity. We are going to relentlessly apply pressure on al Qaeda and its leadership, strengthening the ability of both Afghanistan and Pakistan to do the same.
Notice what’s missing? Any references to defeating the Taliban? Any references to defeating al Qaeda? Any reference to victory? No to all three.
In short, the president has picked the right general, but for the wrong objectives. He (the president) still wants merely to end the war, not to win it. That’s a flaw no general can fix, not even David Petraeus.
[...] Cross-posted to RWL [...]
Patraeus is the epitome of a pentagon politician. He’s with Obama because he wants Mullen’s job.
The Afghan strategy now seems to be a warmed over version of the Vietnam Paris Peace talks minus an Operation Linebacker component. The resulting reality of this failed war will be bloody instability from the Stans all the way to Indonesia as radical fundamentalists pursue the original goal of all oil for a new Dar al-Islam caliphate. The genocide of Rwanda and Cambodia will become a minor footnote in history, replaced by Central/SE Asia, and eventually the oil regions of Africa.
There will be no need for recruiting drives because when the last American boot lifts off Afghan soil, the entire Islamic world will realize it was Allah’s will and their personal destiny to join the cause.
You see we have never really understood the enemy and their dream. Besides a bunch of flag waving and singing God Bless America, our country has remained ignorant and unengaged as we send our military on deployment after deployment after deployment that grinds down combat efficiency with no clear objectives.
America had a dream once. 9/11 began the loss.
This article is myopic. Bush didn’t implement Petraeu’s strategy to actually win Iraq until years after he should have. And Obama has largely continued Bush’s stupid policies. Bush can want to win to infinity, but he couldn’t. His strategy of democracy-building was fail.
I have a different theory. I think McCrystal’s vaunted strategy was failing and he did not know how to fix it but he could not bail out without being recognized as a failure so he engineered this clever way.
No one in their right mind would think that a guy that was supposed to be this smart about strategy and tactics would be this dumb about – strategy and tactics, eh?
Nope.. This was a purposeful act – a cowardly act in fact.
And as far as Obama and Islamofascism and Al-Qaeda, I would imagine you war mongers would also want us to go into Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Ethiopia, Sudan, Iran, etc… and also pay for it with a credit card while we do tax cuts at the same time.
Mr. Bush and Cheney were idiots and you guys are IDIOT-LOVERS.
The only saving grace is that you have no prayer of electing anyone… with your views – and that would include Petraeus who would be the first to tell you guy just how nuts you are about this.
Why thank you for that, Larry. It was quite illuminating in its own way. I’ll be sure to remember this the next time you try your centrist disguise on the Free Lance Star’s comment sections.
Jeez Larry- what’s country’s side are you on anyway?! Are you an American??
Guys – we’re true blue American. We don’t kill Al-Qaeda by invading nation states and attempting nation building.
Even George Bush said early in his term that he had doubts about nation-building.
We don’t stop organizations like Al-Qaeda with the military.
Those who say they fret about saddling our kids with massive debt from deficit spending – do what fighting 2, 3, or more wars on the credit card while advocating tax cuts?
How responsible is that from a Conservative view?
None other than Ron Paul, a REAL Conservative point this out – no?
We won’t beat (win) Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan guys.
McCrystal figured that out but could not say it because it would upset those who think winning in Afghanistan is a viable strategy.
I’m all for beating Al-Qaeda and terrorism but this way is the dumb way.
And that’s a patriotic viewpoint just as it is with Ron Paul.
Funny, I recall all of you left-of-center types screaming that Afghanistan was the “good” war. Now, you’re revealing your true colors.
I’m sure you’re convinced that a combination of arms-control agreements, making nice with terrorist sponsors, and “humility” will get us through.
The trouble is, we tried this in the 1920s (and by we, I mean my party, the Republicans, under Harding, Coolidge and Hoover). It gave Hitler carte blanche to rearm and threaten the world.
Along the why, Adolph reached out to anti-Semitic clerics and Ba’athists in the Middle East, including Yassir Arafat’s mentor and (indirectly) Saddam Hussein’s uncle/guardian.
We learned our painful mistakes (well, almost all of us; Dr. Paul, sadly, never got the memo), and it hurts to see the party that led us out of the pre-WWII darkness (yes, the Democrats) have chosen to embrace the very naivete they so rightly accused us of having.
Sad, just, sad.
I never said it as the “good” war but certainly more justifiable than the bogus one – but we were dumb guy.
Most folks didn’t know the difference between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda and many still do not.
The Taliban number 30 million. You think you’re gonna beat them with 100,000 18-25 -year olds?
I strongly suspect that McCrystal came to that same conclusion.
If my view “left”..??? well .. it’s probably left of you but it’s certainly not the code pink left by far.
All we can do is the same thing we did in Vietnam – hold positions. We’ll never control the landscape unless we want to put 1/2 million troops over there and about 5 times the budget – and keep them there for decades.
Are we REALLY going to do that?
Even if we managed to successfully occupy the country, we’d not trap Al-Qaeda who would just run off to other places.
We’re not dealing with a nation-state problem with Al-Qaeda but we’re acting like the Brits when they could not understand how the Americans were beating them in battle by using guerrilla tactics.
Al-Qaeda has updated this tactic to transcend nation states by finding appropriate failed-nation state hosts.
All we are doing is sending off our young people to get sliced and diced and sent home missing arms and legs guy.
We say we care about our kids… right?
But the worst thing we are doing – is we are abandoning our fiscally conservative principles by pretending that deficits don’t count when it comes to wars – and they do.
Equating Al-Qaeda/Islamofascism to Hitler/Stalin is misguided in my view.
Going after the nation-states in pursuit of Al-Qaeda is paying a million dollars per solider and using our young people as cannon fodder in a dumb strategy that is doomed to fail.
I think it’s actually UNPATRIOTIC to not face the truth especially if we say we care about young people because it is their generation that is going to carry this burden.
so – no.. I do not subscribe to the right-wing view but I’ll make a wager – that I’m no further to the left than Petraeus is and at some point, he’s going to tell you the same thing.
correction – I’m wrong about how many Taliban there are. Not 30 million, more like 30,000. 30 million is the total population of Afghanistan.
Literacy is 34%. The Taliban hold about 50% of the country.
my apologies for the errors but my basic view is the same.
It’s also still wrong. The Taliban and al Q are different, but they were and are very intertwined; it’s why most Afghans hate them both.
The biggest problem is the same (roughly) as in Iraq pre-2007: the locals aren’t convinced we’ll stay, aren’t convinced we’ll take it to the Talibs, and don’t think we understand the danger from the neighbors.
Bush and Petraeus addressed these concerns in Iraq in 2007. I suspect Petraeus will try the same thing (well, adapted to Afghanistan) but run into the July 2011 deadline.
Petraeus would be the first person to tell you that Iraq and Afghanistan are not the same but Petraeus has quite a bit of flexibility according to the President himself today in Toronto.
We’ve been there 10 years and some would have us there how much longer even if Al-Qaeda leaves and diffuses into a half dozen other countries from Pakistan to Yemen and who knows where else?
How many more countries will we want to invade in an effort to go after Al-Qaeda?
When will you be willing to pay for the war instead of passing that debt onto your children?
Don’t get me wrong. We need to defend ourselves and kill Al-Qaeda but we won’t accomplish this by sending the military into every country that
Al-Qaeda chooses to land.
it’s a dumb strategy that sacrifices our young and squanders money we don’t have and apparently conservatives think is “patriotic”.
I just want to suggest the idea that being opposed to this incredibly dumb strategy is not left-wing at all and that conservatism should not mean such a simple-minded definition of patriotism as this.
The military is not going to beat Al-Qaeda by occupying every country they operate in. It’s the wrong plan, the wrong tool and the heck of it is we’ve been down this path before but we never seem to learn the lesson.
Sorry, Larry, but the debt argument isn’t going to work here. I played by the rules at the local level and tried to put together a balanced budget without a tax increase or cuts to education and public safety. The County Admin promptly blasted everything Steve and I put forth, then quietly proposed over half our budget savings as part of its equalized rate plan. All the while you and your Fredtalk crew were dismissing everything I wrote because I deign to remind people that I’m a Republican, and as such we’re not the radioactive aliens so many claim we are.
You wasted whatever credibility you had with me with that idiotic, thoughtless, and incendiary first comment of yours. You’re just a dehumanizing elitist like all the rest.
Now that I’ve had my morning caffeine, I realize I also neglected your main point, so . . .
Iraq and Afghanistan are different, of course, and wherever al Q is, the response depends upon the theatre. In the case of Somalia, for example, we should aid the Ethiopians (who are very keyed into the fight) and the folks in Somaliland (“Puntland”) who’ve managed to govern themselves well and could be useful.
Yemen’s a mess. The more we can trick al Qaeda and Iran into bleeding men and resources in their little proxy war there, the better.
Afghanistan is trickier, but the fact is, the Talibs were al Q’s protectors, while al Q was the Talibs’ financiers and a major source of manpower. We simply cannot leave the country to their mercy.
We can agree to disagree on what our foreign policy should be but I am as or more so patriotic than you think you are.
You are irresponsible if you support fighting these wars on a credit card like Bush did.
That’s totally irresponsible behavior for those who claim to be fiscal conservatives.
Wars require tremendous sacrifices not only for the young people who get blown up but for the rest of us who need to be paying for it and people who support others making the sacrifices are not patriotic nor conservative in my view.
In my mind – there is a clear difference between a right wing war monger and a true fiscal conservative guy.
True fiscal conservatives take responsibility for the things that cost money and don’t blow it off claiming that deficits don’t matter when we fight wars.
That’s the point Mr. Paul makes and that’s where he earns his stripes as a legitimate fiscal conservative.
I think you’re not a fiscal conservative at all but one of convenience.
You apparently don’t mind spending a trillions of dollars of our tax money we don’t have on 22 year old soldiers driving us deep into debt to pass on to our kids but you object to a few thousand dollars for two more Spotsylvania deputies.
And that’s fiscal conservatism and patriotism?
I don’t think so… I actually think it’s “dehumanizing” and elitist to presume one can squander the lives of young people and then send them the bill later also and call it patriotism.
Calling folks who don’t buy into this very unconservative philosophy elitist “left” is comical.
I don’t think you are a fiscal conservative at all guy.
I think you just claim to be one so you can win local elections but you’ll spend us into oblivion for causes you believe in – right?
Wrong, although at this point it doesn’t matter, as you lied about what I proposed and then accuse me of lying; clearly any discussion with you is counterproductive.
@LarryG
Uh, “us war mongers” want to go into Pakistan? It wasn’t John McCain that proposed the great over-mountain invasion of Pakistan during a Presidential debate. That would be Obama.
D.J.- you take great time and pains to put forth an educated and analytical response to most everything you put in writing, and the conservative world is a better place because of your efforts!
I would submit that trying to argue ANY point with LarryG and inflate him with your qualified wisdom is like trying to blow up a balloon made from an old gym sock.
I gave up on him a long time ago, along with Dean Fetteroff and Arch DiPeppe too.
There’s no point in trying to reason with insanity and the fact is that no one is listening to them and their Troll-like rants anyway. You and Steve have both been sucked into their (otherwise empty) world a few times now. I would think you would learn from these mistakes and audit your “time wasted” column on the balance sheet of your day to make a due cut in your own budget.
After all, time is money!
I think we all can benefit from better understanding each other and in fact, we cannot go forward as a county until we do at least find more common ground between us.
In a fiscally conservative world, you guys and me would get a bill every month that said “Supplemental War Tax” instead of us passing bogus supplemental war budgets that are not funded but just pushed onto the longer term debt that ironically is going to be passed on to the same folks who are making personal sacrifices in te military already.
how can anyone claim to be a fiscal conservative and a patriot and not want to pay their fair share ?
Ron Paul makes this same argument. Is he a left wing loon?
by my reckoning, you guys each owe around $5000 so far for the wars and what would you have us do with this cost instead of us paying it?
Ran Paul says that we’d have a are different attitude about these military incursions if we did get a monthly bill and I agree.
And then the idea that we need to be in these countries for “as long as it takes” will have a lot more meaning in my view.
How long would you want to stay there if it cost you $5000 a year and you had to pay up?