Obama's Decision and Speech

"We will fight on land. We will fight in the air. We will fight on the sea-but only for 18 months."

Can you imagine?


While I am glad that President Obama is sending another 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, I would have preferred that he send the entire 40,000 that was requested. I would also have preferred he had made the decision about 2 3/4 months sooner. What we heard last night was hardly what I would call a Churchillian clarion call to victory.

Instead, Obama tried to cut it both ways. On the one hand, he correctly stated that the battle must be won. Both Afghanistan and even more so, Pakistan, are important places right now. We cannot let Al-Qaeda off the hook to simply regroup back in Afghanistan while the Taliban regains power in that country. Yet, on the other hand, Obama put at least equal weight to the notion that we will start leaving in 18 months. The reasoning is that he is putting the Karzai government on notice that they need to clean up the corruption and establish themselves as a legitimate government.

The problem is this, as I see it (and I am no expert on Afghanistan having never been there). Two things are not going to happen in 18 months; the Kabul government will not establish any firm control over the rest of the country and they will not bring an end to corruption. To do so would be to reverse what has existed in Afghanistan since the beginning of time.

If our objective in Afghanistan is nation-building then we are on a fool's errand. Our objective is to kill the enemy that is using the border areas of those two countries to plan more attacks against America and the West.

Also left partially unsaid was the issue of more troops being supplied by our erstwhile Allies, which Obama alluded to in vague terms referring to the future. Good luck. We may get 5,000 from the Brits, but other European countries will or will not throw in a few hundred non-combat troops to provide rear-echelon support.

But for now, all we can do is pray that this increase yields positive results as the surge did in Iraq. In that, we stand behind the President.