On Afghanistan, Obama May Mix McChrystal's Acumen With Biden's Blustering Idiocy, Thus Creating a Perfectly Balanced Plan of Clever and Stupid

Should work.

President Obama’s advisers are focusing on a strategy for Afghanistan aimed at protecting about 10 top population centers, administration officials said Tuesday, describing an approach that would stop short of an all-out assault on the Taliban while still seeking to nurture long-term stability.... At the heart of this strategy is the conclusion that the United States cannot completely eradicate the insurgency in a nation where the Taliban is an indigenous force — nor does it need to in order to protect American national security. Instead, the focus would be on preventing Al Qaeda from returning in force while containing and weakening the Taliban long enough to build Afghan security forces that would eventually take over the mission.

In effect, the approach blends ideas advanced by General McChrystal and by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., seen as opposite poles in the internal debate.

Andrew McCarthy comments:

ME: Am I missing something here? I thought we needed this new strategy because only it would deny safe haven to al-Qaeda. Now, we are evidently going to do counterinsurgency despite conceding at the outset that it won't really work because the Taliban is "an indigenous force" (translation: It has too much support among its fellow Afghan Muslims); under "Biden for the country," we are going to cede the vast countryside to the Taliban, which will then be free to give al-Qaeda the safe-haven it was purportedly our objective to prevent (and you know that's what we're doing because a "senior administration official" felt it necessary to tell the Times, "We are not talking about surrendering the rest of the country to the Taliban")...

Smart. In other words, Al Qaeda will have free reign to build their bombs in the hinterlands, so they can then transport them to our troops ringed around the "population centers" and murder them.

"Present," Obama voted heroically.

posted by Ace at 03:47 PM

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