How will you spend your Thanksgiving break?
What is the point of fighting a war if you're not fighting to win? This is the problem with the American effort in Afghanistan. Obviously President Obama would rather pull out now. But instead, he is sending more troops to that region in a misguided attempt to try to win back the support of the right. The problem is that the right is not so easily duped; anyone with common sense can tell that Obama's "rallying" of the soldiers at West Point was more a feeble political calculation than a call to arms.
How can you say that Afghanistan is a "war of necessity," take eight months to make up your mind on how necessary it is, and then send fewer troops than your general asks for? It doesn't make any sense. But, then again, we have Barack Obama as president.
Obama didn't mention victory or winning or success once during his speech. So, what is his goal? Does he even have one?
The Afghan situation calls for true leadership; not Bush-style brash talk, but not Obama-esque appeasement, either. The goal in Afghanistan should be to make a primitive Democracy that is stable enough to fight off violent radicals who try to intimidate and coerce their way into power. But since we have an administration that avoids using the word "terrorism" (see Obama's speech at Cairo University), this might be too much to expect.
You fight terrorism using intelligence and the barrel of a gun. You don't fight it with political correctness and telling your enemy you have a timetable. Another problem is the way we wage wars. We have more contractors in Iraq than soldiers. Not only that, but we fight wars with our hands tied. I'll bet you can't even punch a terrorist in the face without going through due process.
When you "play by the rules" against people who have no rules, you will lose. This does not mean we have to devolve into barbarism, but the very nature of war is barbaric.
The way Obama has decided to prosecute the war in Afghanistan is a recipe for disaster. It is a half-hearted attempt to put a band-aid on a cut that is gushing blood. And it will continue to bleed unless — and until — all the necessary means to stop it are used. These include intelligence, drones and bombs, as well as a strategy to isolate the extremists from their monetary sources. It also means holding the people we give money to accountable, and forcing them to spend the largesse in the way we have allotted for them to spend it (see: the $5 billion Pakistan wasted not combating the Taliban).
Instead of this, we got Obama's speech, which means the U.S. will go about fighting this War on Terrorism the same way we have for the past eight years. It doesn't matter whether Afghanistan is a war of necessity, what matters is that we are there right now. We have people putting their lives on the line to win.
And what is victory? It is eliminating the festering terrorist threat on the Afghan-Pakistan boarder. Now, some might argue there are terrorists all over the place, and this is what our intelligence should be put to use for. But in Afghanistan, that goal should include wiping out the Taliban, so Obama should either put everything into it or not even bother wasting American lives and dollars in a tepid effort.
