Setting up our military to fail

RALPH PETERS

Just plain nuts: That's the only possible characterization for last night's presidential declaration of surrender in advance of a renewed campaign in Afghanistan.

President Obama will send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan -- but he'll "begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011." Then why send them?

If you're going to tell the Taliban to be patient because we're leaving, what's the point in upping the blood ante? For what will come down to a single year by the time the troops hit the ground?
Does Obama really expect to achieve in one year what we haven't been able to do in more than eight? Adding to the confusion, Obama qualified his timeline by insisting that "we will execute this transition responsibly, taking into account conditions on the ground."

If conditions of the ground are key, why announce a pullout date?

And what did this "new strategy" come down to, otherwise? More of the same, but more: More troops, more civilians, more partnership.
Well, the troops will go, the civilians won't -- and the partnerships are a fantasy.

Our president is setting up our military to fail -- but he'll be able to claim that he gave the generals what they wanted. Failure will be their fault.

He's covering his strong-on-security flank, even as he plays to our white-flag wavers. His cynicism's worthy of a Saddam.

Obama's right about one thing, though: The Afghans "will ultimately be responsible for their own country." So why undercut them with an arbitrary timeline that doesn't begin to allow adequate time to expand and train sufficient Afghan forces? Does he really believe that young Afghans are going to line up to join the army and police knowing that we plan to abandon them in mid-2011?

Does the 2012 election ring a bell?

What messages did our president's bait-and-switch speech just send?

To our troops: Risk your lives for a mission I've written off.

To our allies: Race you to the exit ramp.
To the Taliban: Allah is merciful, your prayers will soon be answered.
To Afghan leaders: Get your stolen wealth out of the country.

To Pakistan: Renew your Taliban friendships now (and be nice to al Qaeda).

This isn't just stupid: It's immoral. No American president has ever espoused such a worthless, self-absorbed non-strategy for his own political gratification.

On the other hand, the stage lighting and the camera angles at West Point were terrific. Our president looked good. Jaw jutting high (in his "hope" pose), he decried political partisanship -- but spent more time blaming Bush and Iraq for our Afghan problems than he spent blaming the Taliban (check it with a stop-watch).

Nor did Obama miss a single chance to praise himself, insisting that he's already transformed our relationship with the Middle East (please notify the Iranians, al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas) and that all of his dithering demonstrated wisdom.
This guy loves to hear himself talk. The last quarter of the speech was boiler-plate rhetoric that wandered off into the clouds. And that human-rights stuff? Where was that during his visits to China and Saudi Arabia? Hypocrisy, thy name is Barack.

Above all, where was the strategy? And where are the four-star resignations over a policy designed to squander American lives just to give an administration political cover?

After eight years of failure to create effective Afghan security forces and a responsible government, does anyone believe we can do it in 12 to 18 months?

"Target the insurgency"? Does that mean our soldiers will finally be permitted to go after our enemies and kill them? Nope. Those troops are going to "secure population centers." We'll be passive and let the enemy choose where and when to strike.

When fighting insurgents and terrorists, if you're not slamming them up against the wall and breaking their bones, you're losing. Obama isn't sending more troops -- he's sending more targets.
How do the Marines and soldiers slated to go to Afghanistan feel today, knowing that their commander-in-chief has already declared defeat?
By the time Obama finally got to Pakistan -- the refuge of evil -- he was spouting pure nonsense: "We are committed to a partnership with Pakistan that is built on a foundation of mutual interests, mutual respect and mutual trust." But our interests diverge, we don't respect each other and we certainly don't trust each other.

Sounded good, though.
Mr. President, how can you send our troops to war without backing them all the way? How could you pull the strategic rug out from under them in advance? Why did you reassure the Taliban that we've already fixed a sell-by date? What's the bloody point?

At West Point last night, President Obama's delivery was superb. But what he was delivering was a funeral oration for his promised strategy.
Ralph Peters' latest book is "The War After Armageddon."

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Tuesday, December 01, 2009

Dean Obama [Victor Davis Hanson]

That was such a strange speech. Deploring partisanship while serially trashing Bush at each new talking point. Sending more troops, but talking more about when they will come home rather than what they will do to the enemy. There was nothing much new in the speech, yet apparently it took the president months to decide whether even to give it.

Ostensibly the talk was to be on Afghanistan; instead, the second half mostly consisted of the usual hope-and-change platitudes.

Still, the president, to his credit, is trying to give the best picture of the Afghanistan war. Obama started well in his review of why George Bush removed the Taliban. But that disinterested narrative lasted about two minutes. Then came the typical Obama talking points that characterize his reset-button foreign policy and don't offer a high degree of confidence that our commander in chief wants to defeat the enemy or believes that he can win the war:

1) Bush did it. Supposedly Bush neglected Afghanistan by going into Iraq, leaving Obama with this mess. (He does not mention why Iraq was largely won, much less why Afghanistan has been going backward the last ten months. If Bush was wrong in going into Iraq, exactly who was right in securing that country?)

2) Avoiding the V-word. Concluding the war seems to be the theme, as opposed to winning the war. "Breaking the momentum" of the Taliban, unfortunately, is not the same as crushing and humiliating the enemy. "Ending the war successfully" lacks the force of "defeating" the enemy and securing "victory." Rather than talk for ten minutes in soaring platitudes, we need 20 seconds devoted to the notion that we will win, the Taliban will lose, and Afghanistan will be secured. His emphasis on civilian and political strategies is fine, but those strategies are first predicated on security. If you are surging, then, darn it, tell the American people that we will secure a military victory.

3) Multilateral phantoms. The allies, contrary to the president's expectation, will not be escalating with us. They are afraid of another Suez, and think that this drawn-out decision does not inspire a great deal of confidence about Obama's desire to defeat the enemy. Our allies fear that we are fickle, and that Afghanistan is like Guantanamo —sorta closed, sorta open. When the multilateral, post-Western Obama ignores allies and reaches out to enemies, it is hard to galvanize allies in a traditional alliance.

4) Deficit. How strange on this military occasion to hear worries about fiscal responsibilities from a president who has just given the country its largest annual budget deficits in history, and who will, according to his own schedule, add more to the national debt than all previous presidents. In a speech intended to win support for more troops, Obama worries more about the $30 billion cost of Afghanistan, even while he borrows $1.7 trillion for everything from AIG bailouts to GM takeovers to "cash for clunkers."

5) Partisanship. How odd that this speech represents the first truly bipartisan outreach of his presidency and will get a fairer hearing from the Republicans, the town-hallers, the tea-partiers, and all those who have previously been demonized on every other initiative.

6) Stanley Baldwin, not Winston Churchill. Not a word about the horrific nature of al-Qaeda and their nightmarish Taliban sponsors, and why both of them are going to fail in the manner that the terrorists and their supporters lost in Iraq. Somewhere in this cerebral but flat speech there is the good news that we won't quit Afghanistan — at least for 18 months — but otherwise it was the sort of talk a college provost gives to the faculty at the September back-to-school assembly.

I am happy that for another 18 months, Obama will fight the Taliban. But I think that, in times of war, when troops are headed into battle, Americans would rather hear "smoke 'em out" and "dead or alive" than a Noble Peace Prize preamble.