Did the Republicans Leave a Booby Trap Behind?

Progressives--don't feel bad if you disagree with Obama's Afghanistan policy. Until recently he didn't agree with it either--Obama is trapped in the old John Kerry "I voted for it before I voted against it" quandary.

The article "Obama Had Rejected His Own Speech's Surge Rationale" at

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/12/02-0 describes as the article states "Proponents of escalation have insisted that the Taliban would inevitably provide new sanctuaries for al Qaeda terrorists inside Afghanistan unless the U.S. counterinsurgency mission was successful.

But during September and October, Obama sought to fend off escalation in Afghanistan in part by suggesting through other White House officials that the interests of the Taliban were no longer coincident with those of al Qaeda.

In fact, intense political maneuvering between Obama and the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, over the latter's troop increase request revolved primarily around the issue of whether the defeat of the Taliban was necessary to U.S. anti-al Qaeda strategy."

McChrystal raised the specter of the Taliban aiding al Qaeda, but as the article states "Only three days later, however, the New York Times reported that "senior administration officials" were saying privately that Obama's national security team was now "arguing that the Taliban in Afghanistan do not pose a direct threat to the United States".

Obama's apathetic plan of keeping Bush 43 hawks as his advisors has acted detrimentally to peace loving progressives in the US as the article states "Gates and his allies had thus defined the options and stacked the deck in favor of the one they were going to support. And the fact that Obama's national security was lined up in support of that option was already on the public record.

It was a textbook demonstration of how the national security apparatus ensures that its policy preference on issues of military force prevail in the White House."

Have heart liberals because Obama has given himself some wiggle room as the article states "Obama's speech even included the suggestion that the defeat of the Taliban was not necessary to U.S. security. That point could be used by Obama to justify future military or diplomatic moves to extract the United States from the quagmire he appeared to fear only a few weeks ago."

Eugene Robinson is a progressive who supports Obama, but his article "Obama takes the wrong path in Afghanistan" at

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/03/AR2009120303606_pf.html shows how liberals can be Obama supporters and dislike his Afghanistan policy as it states "My belief is that if the Taliban begins losing ground, many of its fighters will just melt back into the population and bide their time until the president's July 2011 deadline arrives. At that point, will the Afghan military really be able to stand alone against even a latent Taliban threat? If not, Obama's deadline will be meaningless and U.S. forces will be stuck in Afghanistan, in large numbers, for the foreseeable future.

But even if the surge works, why wouldn't al-Qaeda -- or some like-minded group -- simply set up shop in Somalia? Or in Yemen, another failing state? Or in some other wretched corner of the world where central government authority is weak and resentment of the West's dominant power is high?"

At the beginning of the Iraqi theatre of GWOT Rumsfeld's "slog" memo asked the question if the US could kill more terrorists than were being made by fighting in Islamic countries.

This article states "The "drain the swamp" approach to fighting terrorism doesn't work if the virulence can simply infect the next swamp, and the next."

The specific tactic--the surge, that Obama has chosen, hasn't worked even though we all are pretending it has.

Is the surge actually the reason for the improvement in Iraq? Violence is reduced in Iraq because the US has retreated from the fight, not because of the surge.

The article "Explaining the Drop in Iraqi War Dead" at http://www.smirkingchimp.com/print/25280/ describes that the surge of troops did not lead to the decline in Iraqi violence. The article states "However, there's an opposite way of reading the same data - that Bush's surge increased the Iraqi violence in late spring 2007, including a spike in U.S. casualties, and that only a political-military decision to pull back from offensive operations that summer began the gradual reduction in the killing.

That drop has grown dramatic since mid-2009 when U.S. forces withdrew to bases on the edge of the cities."

The GOP trusts our media and populace to be lazy and as the article states "During last year's presidential campaign, Obama first tried to make a more sophisticated argument, crediting the surge as only one factor in the decline in violence. But network anchors pummeled him in interviews, demanding that he accept that Republican John McCain - and President Bush - had been right about the surge and that Obama had been wrong to oppose it.
Unwilling to pay the price for challenging Washington's conventional wisdom, Obama finally ceded the point and admitted that the surge had "succeeded beyond our wildest dreams."

If Obama had stood his grounds then would he now be surging troops in Afghanistan?

Obama retaining Bush 43 military advisors ascertained that their failed Iraq tactics would be used in Afghanistan as the article states "That concession - and Obama's decision to retain Gates and Petraeus - are now having real-life consequences for Afghanistan. Having bought into the "successful surge" conventional wisdom, Obama is now "surging" some 30,000 additional troops into the Afghan war zone on top of some 22,000 that he sent in the spring, more than doubling the force there when Bush left office."

Could the situation in GWOT and in the Afghanistan theatre of GWOT specifically be better?

The article "Rep. Hinchey: Bush 'intentionally let Bin Laden get away'" at

http://rawstory.com/2009/11/rep-hinchey-bush-intentionally-bin-laden-away/ makes the assertion that as the article states "The Bush administration permitted the world's most notorious terrorist mastermind to escape because it needed additional justification to invade Iraq, according to a Democratic lawmaker from New York....

"Look what happened with regard to our invasion into Afghanistan, how we apparently intentionally let bin Laden get away," he said. "How we intentionally did not follow the Taliban and al-Qaeda as they were escaping. That was done by the previous administration because they knew very well that if they would capture al-Qaeda, there would be no justification for an invasion in Iraq...

The leader of the military operation in the United States called back our military, called them back from going after the head of al-Qaeda because there was a sense that they didn't want to capture him."

The GOP is the Daddy party which succeeds when it is in war and they accuse the Democrats of being weak on national security.

What does Hinchey use to validate his assertions? The article states "Entitled "Tora Bora revisited: how we failed to get Bin Laden and why it matters today," the report -- commissioned by Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee -- says Bin Laden expected to die and had even written a will."

Dennis Kucinich doesn't have Obama's charisma but when he was running for President he vowed to get us out of Bush 43's GWOT quagmires. The article "Kucinich: Afghans want to be saved from us, not by us" at

http://rawstory.com/2009/12/kucinich-afghans-saved/ describes that no one in Afghanistan values our effort there. It states "Why are we still in Afghanistan?" Kucinich asked on the floor of the House of Representatives on Wednesday morning. "Al-Qaeda has been routed. Our occupation fuels a Taliban insurgency. The more troops we send, the more resistance we meet."

"The people of Afghanistan don't want to be saved by us," Kucinich continued.

"They want to be saved from us. Our presence and our Predator drones kill countless innocents, creating more US enemies and destabilizing Pakistan."

The article "President Barack Obama delivered the best speech George W. Bush ever gave in his life" at

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/print/25286/ describes the hatred that many progressives have for Obama's Afghanistan making the worst attack possible of the 44th President-comparing him to his predecessor.

Obama has to realize that he is proceeding into a quagmire and that he should realize that progressives-his base, are against this. Sure he gave a good speech by why are throwing away money on a country that has historically swallowed up occupiers. We don't have the resources to waste in Afghanistan. We need our money to provide jobs in the US not to be wasted on reconstruction projects that the Taliban and al Qaeda will repetitively destroy.

Can't you just see Rove smirking and saying to Bush 43 that starting an occupation in Afghanistan would help them in their goal of creating a permanent GOP advantage? It would be better yet if Bush 43 started it and pretended they were winning and actually left a huge disaster for the Democratic president that had to clean up their mess. Of course it would further GOP goals if Obama adopted the surge strategy and Obama having members of the Bush 43 cabinet advising him made this a certainty.