PrintAugust 8, 2009
NYT Outs Obama's Backwards Afghan Strategy
The New York Times has outed President Obama’s bassackwards strategy of surging troop strength in Afghanistan without a plan.
An August 6, 2009 NYT’s article entitled “White House Struggles to Gauge Afghan Success” begins,
As the American military comes to full strength in the Afghan buildup, the Obama administration is struggling to come up with a long-promised plan to measure whether the war is being won.It continues,
Those ‘metrics’ of success, demanded by Congress and eagerly awaited by the military, are seen as crucial if the president is to convince Capitol Hill and the country that his revamped strategy is working. Without concrete signs of progress, Mr. Obama may lack the political stock — especially among Democrats and his liberal base — to make the case for continuing the military effort or enlarging the American presence.That problem will become particularly acute if American commanders in Afghanistan seek even more troops for a mission that many of Mr. Obama’s most ardent supporters say remains ill defined and open-ended.”
Senator Carl Levin, who recently called for a doubling of troops in Afghanistan, said,
"The metrics are critically important to keep everyone’s feet to the fire on this and for the public to know how we’re doing and have some ways to measure it and not have just rhetoric," said Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
So, Obama’s bassackwards strategy in Afghanistan, tacitly supported by Levin and others, is to execute a surge and then figure out what to do with it.
Looking back over the last few years of the Bush administration, it’s like the disgruntled audience, that relentlessly booed and hissed the actors under the lights, finally gets its turn on stage only to read the same lines, just as badly.
When will Harry Reid proclaim of Afghanistan that “The war is lost”?
If Bush was still president, the NYT’s article might have been entitled “Bush Fails to Gauge Afghan Success.” As it reads now, it’s the fault of a white building.
One of the three authors of the August 6 article is David E. Sanger. He wrote a September 5, 2007 NYT’s piece entitled “Bush offers a new gauge to assess Iraq” wherein he wrote,
But some of Bush's critics regard the change as something far more significant, saying they believe it amounts to a grudging acknowledgment by the White House of something these critics themselves have long asserted: that Iraq will never become the kind of cohesive, unified state that could be a democratic beacon for the Middle East.
