Afghanistan is now Obama's war

[IndianaGreen]

Afghanistan is now Obama's war

By upping the stakes and sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, Obama has donned the mantle of wartime president

Olivia Hampton
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 2 December 2009 01.31 GMT

The wave of goodwill that blessed his historic election, the very aspirations the Nobel nod rewarded, all of that has now subsided as scepticism and disillusionment have settled in, the greying president now down in his job approval ratings and bruised by almost a year of political battles. The messy deliberative process on Afghanistan, punctuated by a flurry of leaks and counterleaks, showed hesitation and second-guessing at a defining moment of his presidency, tarnishing the image built during the campaign of a White House fully in control of its message.

And it's only the beginning. The drums of civil war among the Democrats and partisan fights are already rolling, with Pentagon chief Robert Gates, the country's top military officer Admiral Michael Mullen and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton kicking off on Wednesday a series of hearings on the deeply unpopular war. Now in its ninth year, the "war of necessity," as Obama calls it, has failed to cripple a reinvigorated Taliban-led insurgency, and neither made a dent in the booming Afghan drug trade nor brought stability to a country still reeling from decades of war and two occupations. It is also killing more foreign troops and more Afghan civilians than ever before.

In the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s, some of Obama's fellow Democrats have already proposed a war surtax, with the US troop level now set to reach 100,000 at a cost of one million dollars per soldier, per year. Including military contractors, that means the US forces will be larger than the Soviet forces at the height of its occupation in the 1980s. Factoring in hoped-for pledges from allies, around 150,000 forces are set to operate in Afghanistan, approximately the same number as US troops in Iraq after the 2007 surge.

Eager to tame restive Democrats while also reassuring Republicans he is not the naïve peacenik they make him out to be, Obama made clear the "off-ramps" of US engagement in the years to come, with troop strength carefully calibrated to the Kabul government's progress in battling rampant corruption and increasing the size and efficiency of Afghan security forces.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/dec/02/afghanistan-obama-war

[madrchsod]

1. nobel peace prize......

[IndianaGreen]

2. The terrorist Yasser Arafat also got the Nobel Peace Prize

together with that other terrorist Menachem Begin. Jimmy Carter, who was the man most responsible for Camp David accords, got nothing from the Nobel committee.

[tomm2thumbs]

3. Afghanis-nam - let's get the name right... nt