500,000 Troops for Pashtunistan?
"Our every action must help secure, mobilize and support the Afghan people and their government to defeat the insurgency and establish effective governance."How to "establish effective government" in a country that has never known one, McChrystal does not say. Nor does he tell us how he would do it with an Afghan leadership made up of war lords, drug barons and a president - Hamid Karzai - who won re-election by creating hundreds of phony polling stations and stuffing ballot boxes in wholesale fashion.
3 comments:
I'll believe it when I see it, but it looks like Obama is heading in Biden's direction, against general big mac and his supersized war. This of course just means freezing the current troop levels where they are and re-focusing on "counter-terrorism" against al Qaeda rather than up-rooting the Taliban altogether; it may be cowardly incremental, yet it might lead to a situation where by the 2010 mid-terms there could be pressure for "withdrawal timetables" just as there was in 2006 for Iraq. What these gradual withdrawals actually mean is another issue entirely, but I think the tide is starting to turn rather quickly against "staying the course" in Afghanistan, for various reasons, political-economic and cultural.
Of course I hope your right, but of course in 2006 republicans controlled the house, senate, and white house. "Change" appeared to be as simple as electing democrats. Today dems control all three - and the base the put them there is totally demoralized - by the bank bailouts, the failure to re-regulate wall street, the 'carbon credit' trading system, the decision to take single payer heath care off the table, and of course the decision to send McCyrstal and 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan to prop up a fraudulent gov., not to mention the decision to kill the Goldstone Report and look the other way on Israeli settlements.
I think we are now paying the price for confusing a slick ad campaign with substantive politics. The left made no real demands of Obama, and simply apologized away his atrocious senate voting record and his notoriously vague solganeering.
The Moneyed Interests made their support of Obama conditional upon his protecting their interests. the grassroots imposed no such conditions.
and on 2006 and Iraq- we're still there! and there's no indication that we plan on leaving... so much for "two brigades a month..."
The dems are going to get killed in 2010 - and deservedly so. I hope they lose 40 seats in the house.
health care is a perfect example: Obama will get "bi-partisan" bill that will do nothing to affect the actual healthcare system, but will enrich the interests, and bankrupt the treasury. A couple years from now the hopelessly compromised bill will be seen for the disaster it is - and the Obama and the dems will pay the price- no one will remember that it was a "bi-partisan" bill.
By the time all is said and done, Obama will make Jimmy Carter's presidency appear a towering success.
Our capacity for effective political action is compromised by our inability to see the world as it is.
Its a sorry state of affairs when Obama heading in Biden's direction is a lesser of two evils. But since this post, the Guardian has reported that Obama is already sending 13,000 troops to Afghanistan, and this morning the BBC reports that Obama will send an additional 45,000 troops. For those keeping track that's:
17 + 4 + 13 + 45 = ???
What's that add up to?
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