Obama made his loooooooong anticipated speech tonight on Afghanistan and announced he would send 30,000 troops to help fight the war and then announced a date to withdraw hereby officially dooming this war to the same fate as Vietnam:
President Obama, in a speech that could define the rest of his presidency, announced Tuesday that he was sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan with plans to start withdrawing them in July 2011, a move intended to appease the military, a war-weary public, and anti-war liberals.
President Obama boards Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base, Md., as he travels to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2009, to speak about the war in Afghanistan. (AP)
President Obama, in a speech Tuesday that could define the rest of his presidency, laid out a plan to quickly send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan to revive the struggling war effort while setting a preliminary timeline for withdrawal — aiming to start handing over security roles to Afghan forces by July 2011.
The much anticipated strategy decision is one of the most significant foreign policy moves of Obama’s early presidency, and the White House is hoping the plan will achieve the tough task of appeasing the military, a war-weary public and the anti-war left.
“We did not ask for this fight,” Obama said in a prime-time speech he delivered from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., before tracing the events that led to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, starting with the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Afghanistan has moved backwards, he said, and huge challenges remain. But Obama declared Afghanistan is not lost.
“The 30,000 additional troops that I am announcing tonight will deploy in the first part of 2010 – the fastest pace possible – so that they can target the insurgency and secure key population centers,” Obama said.
“They will increase our ability to train competent Afghan security forces, and to partner with them so that more Afghans can get into the fight,” he said. “And they will help create the conditions for the United States to transfer responsibility to the Afghans.”
Couple problems with this. As he sat twiddling over Afghanistan these troops could of already been in the transition of getting to Afghanistan. But no, instead he waited and waited. It took what? 5-6 months to get the surge troops into Iraq? How long do you think it will take with these troops? And now with the Taliban and al-Qaeda now knowing the date of our surrender all they have to do is wait.
We did not set a date for withdrawal from Iraq until AFTER we had decimated the insurgents inside Iraq.
Obama’s brilliant strategy? Announcing it before we have even came close to decimating them.
All in an effort to appease both sides of the aisle while accomplishing nothing.
The problem is not troop numbers. When he declared on Tuesday, “These additional American and international troops will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011,” the president has undercut the McChrystal plan and made success difficult to achieve.
There should be nothing wrong with an open-ended commitment to victory. In late 2006 and early 2007, when the Bush administration put the finishing touches on the strategy that would become the Iraq surge, Obama and many of his top aides questioned its wisdom. On July 19, 2007, for example, Obama declared, “Here’s what we know. The surge has not worked.” That a year later Obama scrubbed his criticism from his campaign website suggests that today he recognizes the positive impact of George W. Bush’s decision. What Obama fails to understand, however, is that the surge is not only a military strategy, but a psychological one as well.
Iraq’s surge succeeded because Bush convinced Iraqis that he would not subvert his commitment to victory to politics. Bush’s actions showed insurgents had misjudged the U.S. and that Bin Laden was wrong: The U.S. was no paper tiger. Iraqis, no more attracted to al-Qaida’s extreme vision than ordinary Afghans are to the Taliban, believed America to be strong. Rather than make accommodations to the terrorists, Iraqis could fight them. The Sunni tribesmen believed that the U.S. would guard their back, and let neither al-Qaida nor Iranian proxies run roughshod over them. For Iraqis and Afghans, it is an easy decision to ally with militarily superior forces led by a commander-in-chief with a clear and demonstrable will to victory.
Obama is not Bush. By declaring his commitment finite, he removes the psychological force from his surge.
Byron York: (via Ace)
Democratic voters and candidates were playing a complex game. Nearly all of them hated the war in Iraq and wanted to pull Americans out of that country. But they were afraid to appear soft on national security, so they pronounced the smaller conflict in Afghanistan one they could support. Many of them didn’t, really, but for political expediency they supported candidates who said they did. Thus the party base signed on to a good war-bad war strategy.
~~~Other top Democrats adopted the get-tough approach, at least when it came time to campaign. In September 2006, as she was leading the effort that would result in Democrats taking over the House and her becoming speaker, Rep. Nancy Pelosi said George W. Bush “took his eye off the ball” in Afghanistan. “We had a presence over there the past few years, but not to the extent that we needed to get the job done,” Pelosi said. The phrase “took his eye off the ball” became a Democratic mantra about the supposed neglect of Afghanistan — a situation that would be remedied by electing ready-to-fight Democrats.
But now, with Democrats in charge of the entire U.S. government and George Bush nowhere to be found, Pelosi and others in her party are suddenly very, very worried about U.S. escalation in Afghanistan. “There is serious unrest in our caucus,” the speaker said recently. There is so much unrest that Democrats who show little concern about the tripling of already-large budget deficits say they’re worried about the rising cost of the war.
It is in that atmosphere that Obama makes his West Point speech. He had to make certain promises to get elected. Unlike some of his supporters, he has to remember those promises now that he is in office. So he is sending more troops. But he still can’t tell the truth about so many Democratic pledges to support the war in Afghanistan: They didn’t mean it.
The Democrats didn’t mean it? Shocker!
How in the world can this man state that we MUST win this war while saying it will be over on a date certain?
On another note, let’s have a look back a few year: (via HotAirPundit)
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