Wednesday, January 08, 2014

Giving Up On Afghanistan

Hey, I thought Afghanistan was the "good" war.  Apparently not.  Dignified Rant has the link to former secretary of defense Robert Gates' new book.  What he says about Obama's approach to Afghanistan is as unsurprising as it is infuriating.

3 comments:

Eric said...

Winning the peace in Iraq should have been the cornerstone of our big-picture victory in the War on Terror.

Aghanistan has been a necessary mission in direct reaction to 9/11, but within that country is not where we would - or could - win the larger contest.

As such, winding down the Afghanistan mission - however poorly - hasn't bothered me as much as the Obama administration's bungling of the SOFA negotation with Iraq.

We had the peace won in Iraq with the COIN "surge". Incredibly, Obama lost the hard-won winning hand in Iraq he inherited from Bush. Obama's failures have been as though Eisenhower fumbled away our positions in Europe and Asia that had been so hard-won under FDR and Truman.

Former President Clinton, 22JUL03, CNN:
And what I think -- again, I would say the most important thing is we should focus on what's the best way to build Iraq as a democracy? How is the president going to do that and deal with continuing problems in Afghanistan and North Korea? We should be pulling for America on this. We should be pulling for the people of Iraq.

With that in mind, this section from the WaPo article Brian cites angered me the most:
Gates offers a catalogue of various meetings, based in part on notes that he and his aides made at the time, including an exchange between Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that he calls “remarkable.”

He writes: “Hillary told the president that her opposition to the [2007] surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary. . . . The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying.”

These people have no business being anywhere near the Commander in Chief position.

Anonymous said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRM2YcGpmxg

Someone been taking too much time off.

- wodun

lumpy said...

Just saw "Lone Survivor"; it's pretty good.