Oh what a brilliant “Commander-in-Chief” he is. Since “winning isn’t necessarily the goal”, why not give the enemy a deadline for our war efforts and a green light for their victory dance in Kabul?
The Obama administration reaffirmed Sunday that it will begin pulling U.S. troops out of Afghanistan next summer, despite reservations among top generals that absolute deadlines are a mistake.
Obama’s chief of staff said an announced plan to begin bringing forces home in July 2011 still holds.
“That’s not changing. Everybody agreed on that date,” Rahm Emanuel said, adding by name the top three officials overseeing the policy girding the war: Gen. David Petraeus, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen.
Petraeus, the war’s top military boss, said last week that he would recommend delaying the pullout if conditions in Afghanistan warranted it. Days after the date was announced in December, Gates pointedly said it was not a deadline.
Emanuel’s remarks reflect the White House view that Obama must offer a war-weary American public and Congress a promise that the nearly nine-year war is not open-ended. The problem, congressional Republicans and some military leaders say, is that a fixed date encourages the Taliban-led insurgency and undermines U.S. leverage with Afghan leaders.
Ya think?
Gates pledged Sunday that some troops would begin to leave in 13 months, but he was more cautious.
“We clearly understand that in July of 2011, we begin to draw down our forces,” Gates said. “The pace with which we draw down and how many we draw down is going to be conditions-based.”
Uniformed and civilian defense leaders accepted the announcement of a date to begin leaving as a condition of Obama’s major expansion of the war. Obama ordered an additional 30,000 troops, the last of whom are arriving now, with a mission to squeeze the Taliban on its home ground, build up Afghan security forces and improve chances that local people would swing behind the U.S.-backed central government.
With little progress apparent in the critical Taliban heartland of southern Afghanistan, the split between politics and tactics is again on display. As Gates acknowledged Sunday, it is taking longer than he hoped to gain an enduring edge over the Taliban in Helmand and Kandahar provinces.
……Petraeus told Congress last week that he would recommend postponing the start of the withdrawal if security conditions and the capability of the Afghan government could not support it.
That does not mean Petraeus is opposed to bringing some troops home, and he said repeatedly that he supports Obama’s strategy. His caution, however, is rooted in the fact that the uniformed military—and counterinsurgency specialists in particular—have always been uncomfortable with fixed parameters for an inexact process of persuasion.
The war strategy Obama adopted is based on the success of Petraeus’ counterinsurgency tactics in the Iraq war. It combines a short-term “surge” of forces to blunt rising violence and a longer-term project to persuade locals to help uproot a homegrown insurgency.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9GF69QO0&show_article=1
If America really wanted to win, we’d have gone all out as we did in WWII and dedicated our efforts to a complete and unequivocal defeat of every single Islamic state in existence. Instead, terrorist leaders and their cells thrive unabated. The State Department, Homeland Security Department, FBI, Department of Justice, and the White House occupants for the last 20 years, have done little to confront the threat of Islamic terrorism on our own soil.
Read excerpts from Steve Emerson’s American Jihad:
http://iona.ghandchi.com/emerson.htm
This piecemeal approach to war is just plain fucking stupid. This is no war, it’s a half-assed fight.
The Islamic enemy is not concentrated in Iraq and Afghanistan; the whole Middle East is their domain and it should be treated as such. The entire region should be subjected to the full force of American MOABs and a follow on contingency of Army divisions. The day after the muslim pigs attacked this country is the day we should have laid waste to Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Syria….for starters.
These cockroaches continue to crawl out of the woodwork and stomping them one at a time will not destroy the nest.