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Charles Krauthammer gives his thoughts on the President’s indecision regarding an Afghanistan strategy.
On Obama’s lack of response to the McChrystal memo on Afghanistan:
‘Well, I think what’s really important here are two dates. The first is August 30. That’s when the McChrystal report was sent to Washington. That is three weeks ago. Obama has had a single meeting [on that report] since then.
He says he hasn’t reached a conclusion — I suppose because he is spending all his time preparing for Letterman and speeches to schoolchildren — to focus on a war in which our soldiers are in the field getting shot at and, as the president himself is saying, without a strategy.
Now, the other date is the 27th of March, when Obama gave a speech in the White House flanked by his Secretaries of Defense and State, in which he said, and I will read you this, because it is as if it never happened, “Today I’m announcing a comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
So we for six months have been living under the new Obama strategy, of which he says today we have none. And his next sentence is, again in March, “This marks the conclusion of a careful policy review” — not the beginning, the end of the policy review.
So it has been his policy, and now he tells us we don’t have a cart and we don’t have a horse”. …
Jennifer Rubin also comments on the Obama’s delay in committing to a strategy in Afghanistan.
President Obama took to the airwaves to bob and weave on Afghanistan. When will he make a decision? Why hasn’t he already? He won’t say and gives every indication that a massive stall is underway. He goes as far as to suggest that he’s still lacking a strategy from his military.
One problem: that explanation is apparently false. The Washington Post gets its leak:
The top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan warns in an urgent, confidential assessment of the war that he needs more forces within the next year and bluntly states that without them, the eight-year conflict “will likely result in failure,” according to a copy of the 66-page document obtained by The Washington Post.
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal says emphatically: “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) — while Afghan security capacity matures — risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.”
His assessment was sent to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Aug. 30 and is now being reviewed by President Obama and his national security team.
August 30? Yup. So what’s holding up a decision? One can’t help but conclude that the president lacks the will to make the tough call in a timely fashion to start on that 12-month effort to gain back the initiative. It’s daunting to make a tough national-security call in the face of domestic opposition from your own party. But at this point it seems that it’s only domestic politics—not a lack of facts or a failure to receive a recommendation—that’s holding back the president. …
In The Politico, Ben Smith discusses the leaked Afghanistan report, and lays out the possible reasons why the report was leaked.
Bob Woodward’s Monday-morning exclusive on a 66-page report from Gen. Stanley McChrystal to President Barack Obama about Afghanistan policy was a rite of passage for the new administration: the first major national security leak and a sure sign that the celebrated Washington Post reporter has penetrated yet another administration.
White House officials greeted the leak with a grimace, but none suggested they’d begin a witch hunt for the leaker. Woodward is famous for his access to the principals themselves — he recently traveled to Afghanistan with National Security Adviser James Jones — and leak hunters couldn’t expect with confidence that they’d find themselves disciplining just an undisciplined junior staffer.
But inside the White House and out, the leak touched off another familiar Washington ritual: speculation about the leaker’s identity and motives.
This is a capital parlor game that, for the Obama administration, has some dire implications. Unless the West Wing somehow orchestrated an elaborate head fake — authorizing what looks at first blush like an intolerable breach of Obama’s internal deliberations — the Woodward story suggests deeper problems for a new president than a bad news cycle.
Woodward — like other reporters, only more so — tends to shake loose information when he can exploit policy conflicts within an administration. There is now a big one over a critical national security decision, along with evidence that some people who ostensibly work for Obama feel they can pressure him with impunity. It took several years within former President George W. Bush’s administration before deep personal and policy fissures became visible. …
Victor Davis Hanson presents theories on why the war in Afghanistan has intensified.
Something is not quite right about the conventional wisdom about the Afghanistan war. For nearly eight years, yearly casualties in Afghanistan sometimes were less than a month’s losses in the dire days in Iraq (e.g., 98 Americans killed in 2006 in Afghanistan, 112 killed in Iraq during December 2006). …
…Just as likely are two other developments never mentioned:
1) Just as Iraq was our second theater in the war on terror, so it was for al-Qaeda and generic jihadists as well. They diverted thousands into Anbar Province and Baghdad proper rather than into Afghanistan; and while for a period they gained traction, ultimately they lost thousands in combat or through defection. That fact may have weakened their efforts in Afghanistan rather than strengthened them; and after their material and psychological defeat in Iraq they have returned their attention to the single front in Afghanistan. In other words, they took their eye off the ball in Afghanistan and focused on Iraq, but lost both materially and psychologically, and now, like us, are refocusing on the single front.
2) We were far more able to inflict casualties (given the terrain, geopolitics, and nature of the fighting) in Iraq than in Afghanistan, and that resulted in both more damage to terrorism in general, and a greater sense of deterrence than was true of the fighting alone in Afghanistan/Pakistan. When bin Laden and Zawahiri announced that Iraq was the major front in the terrorist war on the U.S., they raised the stakes, and were in essence inviting terrorists to go there rather than to Waziristan. …
…it may well be that the Islamists are now increasingly unpopular, down to one front, and waging their all on a last big effort to demoralize us. Both in conventional wars and in insurgencies (as we saw in 2007 in Iraq) sometimes the fiercest fighting is near the end rather than the beginning of the war, as a final offensive is seen as a last gambit. All this means that we should meet the challenge, support the president, and deal with the Taliban and its al-Qaeda allies as we did in 2007 to the terrorists in Iraq, despite the wide differences in culture and conditions on the ground in the respective countries.
Edward Lucas, writing for The Daily Telegraph, UK, gives a European perspective on Obama’s performance.
…Admittedly, the presidential to-do list is terrifying. The economy requires his full-time attention. So does health-care reform. And climate change. Indeed, he deserves praise for spending so much time on thankless foreign policy issues. He is tackling all the big problems: restarting Middle East peace talks, defanging Iran and North Korea and a “reset” of relations with Russia. But none of them are working. …
…Even good moves are ruined by bad presentation. Changing Mr Bush’s costly and untried missile-defence scheme for something workable was sensible. But offensively casual treatment of east European allies such as Poland made it easy for his critics to portray it as naïve appeasement of the regime in Moscow.
Mr Obama’s public image rests increasingly heavily on his extraordinary speechifying abilities. His call in Cairo for a new start in relations with the Muslim world was pitch-perfect. So was his speech in Ghana, decrying Africa’s culture of bad government. His appeal to both houses of Congress to support health care was masterly – though the oratory was far more impressive than the mish-mash plan behind it. This morning he is blitzing the airwaves, giving interviews to all America’s main television stations.
But for what? Mr Obama has tactics a plenty – calm and patient engagement with unpleasant regimes, finding common interests, appealing to shared values – but where is the strategy? What, exactly, did “Change you can believe in” – the hallmark slogan of his campaign – actually mean?
The President’s domestic critics who accuse him of being the sinister wielder of a socialist master-plan are wide of the mark. The man who has run nothing more demanding than the Harvard Law Review is beginning to look out of his depth in the world’s top job. His credibility is seeping away, and it will require concrete achievements rather than more soaring oratory to recover it.
In the New York Daily News, Elizabeth Benjamin reports on the aftermath of the Obama administration getting involved in state politics.
…New York Democrats were stunned by the Obama administration’s heavy-handedness, noting it’s the third time the President meddled in local politics. …
…A source involved with the administration’s deliberations over how to handle Paterson admitted the way this played out was not ideal, but insisted the short-term mess is worth the long-term gain. …
…Now that it has sowed seeds of doubt against Paterson by expressing a “preference” he take a pass on 2010, the White House plans to sit back and let time – and nervous New York Democrats – push the governor the rest of the way out the door.
Few were stepping up yesterday to wholeheartedly endorse the idea that he should run, not even Rep. Serrano.
“The governor will make his own decision,” the congressman said. “The governor is a Democrat, and I don’t know at what point the White House gets involved in these things.”
Hats off to Mark Steyn for his article on the Tea Party movement.
…But a lot of the protesters don’t have the same comfortably padded margin for error on the unprecedented Obama scale. What the Democrats are doing means that millions of the hardest-working Americans will have to put their business expansion and their roomier house and their vacation camp and music lessons for the kid on hold. And “on hold” presupposes that one day the retrenchment, the hunkering down, will end. But why would it? In many Continental countries, a smaller home and a smaller car are the norm. It’s not just about the money — DON’T TAX ME, BRO! — but about the web of regulations that ensnare you at every turn: As Mason Weaver told the 9/12 rally, “Ropes and chains, not hope and change.” Cute line. It went entirely unreported in the mainstream media, presumably because he’s another one of those “angry white males,” although he happens to be black. (“I thought you’d like to hear a black man speak without a TelePrompTer,” he told the crowd. Another cute line.)
What does he mean, “ropes and chains”? The other day I was talking to a stonemason and a roofer who were asked to do a job for a certain large institution in New Hampshire. They were obliged to attend “ladder school,” even though both have been working at the tops of high ladders for over 40 years. The gentleman from OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) cautioned them against mocking his transparent waste of their time: Under the new administration, he explained, his bureaucracy would be adopting a more enforcement-oriented approach to private business. So they rolled their eyes merely metaphorically and consented to give up a working day because the federal government has taken to itself the right to credentialize ladder-climbing from Maine to Hawaii.
At a certain point, why bother? As fast as you climb the ladder, you’ll be taxed and regulated down the chute back to the bottom rung. You’ll be frantically pedaling the treadmill seven days a week so that the statist succubus squatting on your head can sluice the fruits of your labors to Barney Frank and the new “green jobs” czar and whichever less hooker-friendly “community organizer” racket picks up the slack from ACORN, as well as to untold millions of bureaucrats micro-regulating you till your pips squeak while they enjoy vacations and benefits you’ll never get. Who needs it? If you have to work, work for the government: You can’t be fired and you can retire in your early 50s. Running your own business is for chumps. …
…I’m a foreigner. In the wake of the economic meltdown last fall, there were protests from Iceland to Bulgaria, with mobs all demanding the same thing of their rulers: Why didn’t you, the government, do more for me? This is the only country in the developed world where hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets to tell the state: I could do just fine if only you’d get the hell out of my life — or at least confine yourself to constitutional responsibilities. I find that heartening and hopeful. …