Getting Out of Afghanistan

[babylonsister]

http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2012/5/20/123118/208

Getting Out of Afghanistan

by BooMan
Sun May 20th, 2012 at 12:31:18 PM EST


I'm sure the president will be attacked for making it our policy to get the hell out of Afghanistan, but the only way I could be happier about it would be if he had made the decision sooner and it was implemented faster. Honestly, it's not entirely clear when he made the decision. He campaigned on getting out of Iraq so we could refocus on Afghanistan. But I always sensed that that rhetoric was calibrated to prevent him from looking weak as he called for an end to the war in Iraq. In any case, once elected he had immediate cause to doubt the wisdom of doubling down in Afghanistan:

The remaking of American strategy in Afghanistan began, though no one knew it at the time, in a cramped conference room in Mr. Obama’s transition headquarters in late 2008. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, who had spent the last two years of the Bush administration trying to manage the many trade-offs necessary as the Iraq war consumed troop and intelligence resources needed in Afghanistan, arrived with a PowerPoint presentation.

The first slide that General Lute threw onto the screen caught the eye of Thomas E. Donilon, later President Obama’s national security adviser. “It said we do not have a strategy in Afghanistan that you can articulate or achieve,” Mr. Donilon recalled three years later. “We had been at war for eight years, and no one could explain the strategy.”

Partially because of his campaign rhetoric, and partially because the military brass was committed to the fight, Obama felt boxed into making a temporary surge of troops. But he wasn't happy about it:

“I think he hated the idea from the beginning,” one of his advisers said of the surge. “He understood why we needed to try, to knock back the Taliban. But the military was ‘all in,’ as they say, and Obama wasn’t.”

snip//

President Bush gave Obama two unwinnable wars to deal with. And he's dealt with them about as well as could be expected. When you hear Republicans criticize his decisions and his leadership, make sure you remember that. I've made my own criticisms. I don't think the surge was worth it. But I don't have to make these calls and somehow survive politically.