Reply #5: Not so. [View All]

[babylonsister]

http://host.madison.com/ct/news/local/govt_and_politics/article_dc49c240-e025-11de-8269-001cc4c03286.html

How Biden got Obama to shift on Afghanistan

By GREG JAFFE and ANNE E. KORNBLUT | The Washington Post | Posted: Thursday, December 3, 2009 10:00 am | (4) Comments

buy this photo Vice President Joe Biden Haraz N. Ghanbari - Associated Press

President Obama’s decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan looks at first like a defeat for his vice president, who pushed hard for holding down the number of U.S. troops in the country. But the plan also gives Vice President Biden a lasting victory: a strategy that lays out far more modest goals for the embattled nation.

Biden originally argued that it would be fruitless -- perhaps even naive -- to add more forces in the hope of stabilizing Afghanistan by shoring up its central government. Besides the country’s fragmented political history and his own doubts about President Hamid Karzai, Biden viewed Afghanistan as a much different and more difficult place than Iraq, with a far higher illiteracy rate and fragmented civil society, senior administration officials said.

Obama ultimately sided with the dire assessment of his top field commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, that without a massive increase in troop levels the war would be lost. But Biden’s central point -- that the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan should be limited to denying al-Qaida a haven in the country from which it planned the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks -- shifted the debate within the administration.

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