Foreign Affairs
Related: About this forumObama’s Half-Hearted War
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/368146/obamas-half-hearted-war-editorsObamas Half-Hearted War
By The Editors
January 10, 2014 4:00 PM
Because there is no such thing as an irrelevant abuse of power, the medias keen interest in the Governor Chris Christie drama has been necessary and welcome. And yet, like many things, scandals come in different degrees. With this in mind, we can only wish that the press corps displayed half the interest in stories of profound national importance that it does in the traffic of the greater New York area. It is amazing how quickly Bridgegate has buried Bob Gates-gate, Steven Rattner, the former head of President Obamas auto-industry task force, wrote yesterday. Indeed so. Yet the bigger surprise is that Bridgegate overshadowed Gatess testimony at all.
In his new memoir, former defense secretary Robert Gates depicts a president who had lost faith in his own war in Afghanistan, but ordered more troops to fight there anyway. Per Gates, President Obama committed 50,000 young men and women to a conflict in Afghanistan that its commander-in-chief was skeptical if not outright convinced would fail. For him, Gates added, its all about getting out. Understandably, this left Gates dismayed. We hope thats an understatement.
Gates depicts a White House suffused with a poisonous distrust of the military. The president, of course, had campaigned on Afghanistan as the good war and pledged to send more troops there. But when he took office and his commander on the ground requested the actual number of troops he thought he needed to fulfill the mission, Obama and his aides were outraged and felt betrayed. The president evidently went with the surge because he felt he had no way out, but his heart was never in it. He has failed to make a public case for his own war.
This doesnt bode well for the Afghan endgame. We have already seen the windfall to militants from the U.S. retreat from the Middle East. This week it was revealed that al-Qaeda now controls more territory in the Arab world than at any point since the outfit was founded stretching more than 400 miles and that it has taken the hard-won Iraqi city of Fallujah back from U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces. In Iraq, the tide of war didnt recede (in Obamas word) so much as shift in al-Qaedas favor after the U.S. withdrawal. If the administration now decides to pull out entirely from Afghanistan, the Taliban will surely get a similar boost, and so many of the gains won by the troops that the president sent to fight a distant war will wash away.
CFLDem
(2,083 posts)bemildred
(90,061 posts)I mean there was that Soviet example right before us, same idea, same basic result: quagmire?
tazkcmo
(7,286 posts)But our CIC was Georgie "Fuck up Everything I Touch" Bush who was busy raping Iraq for fun and profit so to lay all of it on Obama isn't really fair. How long should we stay? At what point should
Afghanistan assume responsibility and full control over their country? I feel like we've accomplished about all we can hope to accomplish. The article mentions 'end game". This is no game. Again, what were our goals? How many American lives are sufficient to sacrifice in order to achieve those goals? Do we have a never ending responsibility to Iraq and Afghanistan in terms of defense? I'm a bit tired of chicken hawks calling for endless occupation with no clear cut goals or worse, unrealistic ones.
TwilightGardener
(46,416 posts)the Generals, and now Gates and Hillary get to keep their reputations intact even though the mission hasn't really been worth it and their advice was wrong. Obama should have known that at the end of the day, only he will be held responsible for the results, and his advisors will pull shit like write memoirs blaming him for doing what they said, but not being enthusiastic enough--this is how old Bob is going to avoid owning a sad disappointment of a war that he managed for two years before Obama even took office. Obama should never have confided in the backstabbing little shit--it was a massive betrayal by a SecDef to come out with this while the war is still going on, and now Obama and his new SoS and SecDef have to manage the fallout as they try to end Afghanistan on a good note.