Correct Policy - Disappointing Speech

Barnes: A Disappointing Speech in Support of the Right Policy

President Obama’s speech on Afghanistan was disappointing. Yes, the policy is right: more troops, a counter-insurgency strategy, a stronger alliance with Pakistan. But the personal commitment of the president to pursue the war against the Taliban and al Qaeda until they are defeated was not there. Obama did not take ownership of the war. It’s still the war in Afghanistan, not Obama’s War.

Maybe the president wants it that way. It may keep him from experiencing the fate of Lyndon Johnson, whose presidency suffered -- indeed was all but destroyed -- by his failure in Vietnam. But it will also keep him from gaining the vindication that George Bush has earned for his decision to order a “surge” that allowed America to prevail in Iraq.

I had hoped Obama would declare that nothing will deter him, as commander-in-chief, from prevailing in Afghanistan. But it turns out a lot of things might deter him. He listed a few of them: the cost of the war, its length (if more than 18 months from January 2010), the failure of Afghans to step up to the task sufficiently. He hedged.
Americans and our allies were looking for more, I believe. To have rallied the country and the world, Obama needed to indicate he would lead a fight to win in Afghanistan,
with the help of allies if possible, but with the armed forces of the U.S. alone if necessary. He didn’t say anything like that. He didn’t come close.

The result of the speech, I suspect, will be stagnant but still poor poll numbers here. He may have halted the downward drift of public support for the war for the time being. I doubt he persuaded any NATO countries to deploy more combat troops. Since he didn’t give a number -- 10,000 has been used by his aides -- he must not except very many to be offered.

I couldn’t be the only person who thought Obama once again both scapegoated and slighted George W. Bush. Early on in his administration, Obama recalled that he had agreed to a “longstanding request for more troops” in Afghanistan, implying that Bush had turned that request down. I don’t think that’s quite accurate.

And Obama praised the military for the success of the “surge” in Iraq without mentioning the person who -- against the advice of nearly everyone in Washington -- ordered that troop increase, Bush. Obama tacitly acknowledged the surge had worked, though he didn’t seem to remember that he’d insisted that it would worsen conditions in Iraq.

Despite the shortcomings of the speech, Obama made the right policy decision. He deserves credit for that. It won’t go down well with the antiwar, pacifist left wing of his party. That’s not only his base. It’s his political home. Up to now, the president hadn’t done anything to upset any of the constituency groups of the Democratic party. Now he has. Thank heavens for that.

A Blue Star Mom Speaks To The CiC

Mr Obama, Our Troops Are Dying!

Blackfive and Uncle Jimbo

Its like a traffic accident; you know you're gonna look.

The last two sentences are important and I wholeheartedly agree with every word.

Posted By Uncle Jimbo at Blackfive.net

It is imperative that President Obama delay any decision on Afghanistan until after an upcoming runoff between current President Hamid Karzai and his oppponent Abdullah2 because A2 has very diffferent views about US presence in his country and will likely call for a withdrawal of our forces.....Oh wait.

Afghanistan's opposition candidate backed Gen. Stanley McChrystal's recommendations for more troops Sunday, saying "the future of the country is at risk" without a "dramatic increase" in troop levels.......

Abdullah reiterated on CNN that he shared the assessment of McChrystal, who has reportedly recommended a surge of 40,000 troops, that the situation is deteriorating and that more international troops are needed “at this stage.”

Abdullah also said that it is also important to consider a “road map” of drawing down U.S. and other international troops.

President Obama has been aware of just exactly what was and is going on and at stake in Afghanistan for almost a year now. He has seen three separate assessments, Lute, Seidel and now McChrystal that say go big or go home. Now we have 14 troops die in helicopter crashes and 8 more in IEDs in two days.

He has shown no leadership and plenty of weakness to our enemies and our allies. More meetings and more coffee sipping isn't going to change a damn thing on the ground except to watch it deteriorate. If anyone wonders why I hate politics and politicians this is a perfect example. There is no legitimate way to frame this as a decision made on strategic national security concerns.

Get off the dime sir, better men and women than you are dying.

Reinforce them and try to win or bring them home now!

Go Big or Go Home

October 6, 2009 By Amanda Reinecker

Moving forward in Afghanistan

Last Saturday, eight American servicemen and two Afghan policemen were killed in a terrorist assault in Afghanistan.

This blow comes at a critical point in the war, when General Stanley McChrystal, the NATO commander, has reportedly asked President Obama for an additional 40,000 U.S. troops in order to beat the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Despite pledges to improve security in Afghanistan, the President now seems on the fence about fulfilling his commander's request.

McChrystal has offered a promising strategy for the war. President Obama would be wise to embrace this long view strategy, writes Heritage's Conn Carroll in the Morning Bell, "and avoid short-sighted policies that undermine our friends in Afghanistan and Pakistan, while encouraging our enemies."

Americans should pay close attention to the path President Obama chooses in Afghanistan, since his decision will prove critical to America's national security interests, write Heritage Foundation experts Lisa Curtis and James Phillips.

"There appears to be some wishful thinking within the Obama Administration regarding the U.S's ability to negotiate a political solution with the Taliban," write Curtis and Phillips. But negotiations have yet to work with al-Qaeda and Taliban, who are now more unified than ever by their anti-Western aims.

As Henry Kissinger wrote in Newsweek, "even so-called realists -- like me -- would gag at a tacit U.S. cooperation with the Taliban in the governance of Afghanistan."

Recent U.S. gains in Pakistan provide sufficient evidence that we can succeed, but only with continued dedication and support in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. "Now is the time to demonstrate military resolve in Afghanistan so that al-Qaeda and its affiliates will be squeezed on both sides," insist Curtis and Phillips. "Waiting does not prolong a favorable outcome. This effort will not remain winnable indefinitely, nor will public support."

Yet the Left continues to stall any decision by pressuring the White House to devise an exit strategy and refuse any additional troops. President Obama should ignore
the partisan rhetoric. Instead, he should trust the expertise and judgment of those he personally appointed to lead.

"If the Obama administration chooses to deny its field commander's request for more troops and instead seeks to engage Taliban leaders in negotiations with the vain hope that these militants will break from their al-Qaeda allies, the results will likely be disastrous," warn Curtis and Phillips.

Part 2 Jeff Emanuel Redstate

Author’s note: This is the second installment in a seven-part series analyzing the Obama administration’s strategy for the Afghan front in the War on Terror. The administration’s white paper can be seen here, and part one of this series, “Examining Obama’s Afghan Plan: Introduction,” can be seen here.

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S IMPENDING ‘SURGE’ in the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan has been public knowledge for some time now. In fact, the roots of the plan can actually be found in the Bush administration, whose final days saw a greater emphasis placed on that eastern front in the War on Terror than had been since late 2002. The initial thought, as publicly announced by Defense Secretary Robert Gates last November, was to send approximately 30,000 additional troops to augment the 33,000 already operating in the expansive, mountainous country.

Shortly after taking office, Obama ordered that number cut nearly in half, to 17,000. Those troops – a combined force of soldiers and Marines – will be assigned to areas of the county along the border with Pakistan, where the coalition has the least control and terrorist forces are at their strongest, and will be tasked with “preventing a return of al Qadea and its allies” to the area and with providing space and security for the national government to expand its hegemony into this largely warlord- and Taliban-controlled region of Afghanistan.

In addition to this 17,000-troop counterinsurgency force, Obama has assigned 7,000 more troops to Afghanistan to perform other critically important tasks. In February, the just over 3,000 soldiers that make up the 10th Mountain Division’s 3rd Brigade Combat Team (BCT) deployed to two Afghan provinces near Kabul, where they are operating out of coalition outposts in an effort to tamp down the insurgency-riddled east-central portion of the country. An additional 4,000 soldiers are now awaiting deployment to the region to serve as embedded Afghan Security Force Training Teams.

There is no question that the coalition forces currently in Afghanistan, who are fewer than 30% in number than their counterparts assigned to Iraq, are in need of reinforcement. In fact, given that Afghanistan’s surface area is 120% that of Iraq, with exponentially more difficult terrain, a 24,000-troop ’surge’ is likely far too small to make any measurable difference in that country’s day-to-day development and security, even if they are employed correctly.

Further, the specialists being recruited for deployment to Afghanistan as part of Obama’s so-called ‘civilian surge’ – currently estimated at about 400 – are also likely far too small in number to accomplish what will be expected of them. If properly employed, this small number of specialists, who bring expertise in agriculture, law, and other areas to a region desperately in need of their assistance, could do a great deal of good in the few areas they can influence. However, like the so-called ’surge’ troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, these specialists will need to be pushed out of the national and regional levels and into the expansive state’s agrarian, tribal localities in order to be effective – something career bureaucrats and government employees are notorious for their reluctance to do (for evidence of this, witness the revolt by bureaucrats within the State Department when faced with the mere prospect of deployment to Iraq’s secure International Zone in 2007).

Continued here

Jeff Emanuel Examines Big O's Afghan Strategy

AMERICA’S GOAL IN THE REGION, according to Obama, is “to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future.” In pursuit of this nebulous goal, which can be categorically filed under “Would take far more time and dedication than Obama (and, unfortunately, the American population) would ever willingly put into it,” the president laid out several points of emphasis.

These points, each of which will be addressed in an installment over the next week, can be grouped into the following five goals:

Implementing a ’surge’ of forces in Afghanistan (and augmenting that with a so-called “civilian surge”);

Growing the Afghan Security Forces, both police and army, by such numbers and with such speed that they will be able to assume responsibility securing large portions of the country in a very short time;

Attempting to achieve reconciliation with less-hardline Taliban militants and promoting an open, honest, and effective Afghan national government;

Expanding international support for the Afghan mission and convincing both NATO and regional players to take a more active role in combating terror and shaping the Afghan state; and, perhaps most importantly,

Eliminating Taliban and al Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan, while simultaneously promoting democratic order within that fractured Islamic state.

Unfortunately, as the next five installments on this topic will demonstrate, President Obama’s strategy as currently laid out will do little to make a difference on any of these fronts.
Coming next: Examining Obama’s Afghan Plan: A ‘Surge’ in Soldiers and Civilians

We Really Have Won

The Great Betrayal

By David Horowitz and Ben Johnson
FrontPageMagazine.comThursday, March 19, 2009

On this sixth anniversary of America's invasion of Iraq, there is finally a consensus among supporters and opponents that we've won the war. The surge that Bush launched and Democrats opposed has been successful and, as a result, Iraq has become a Middle Eastern democracy, an anti-terrorist regime, and an American ally. It would be hard to imagine a more remarkable turnabout or a more comprehensive repudiation of conventional political wisdom. Yet this has not led to a comparable reappraisal by critics of the war of their previous attacks, or to any mea culpas by Democrats who launched a scorched earth campaign against the president who led it, and continued it for five years while the war dragged on.

The Democratic attacks on the war described America's commander-in-chief as a liar who misled his country and sent American soldiers to die in a conflict that was unnecessary, illegal and unjust. This made prosecution of the war incalculably harder while strengthening the resolve of our enemies to defeat us. It is time to re-evaluate the words and actions of the war's opponents in the stark light of a history that proved them wrong.

In the fall of 2002, a majority of Democrats in the Senate joined Republicans in voting to authorize President Bush to use force to remove the regime of Saddam Hussein. In July 2003, only three months after Saddam had been removed, the Democratic National Committee launched a national campaign which accused President Bush of lying in order to trick Democrats into voting for the war. It was the beginning of a five-year campaign designed to paint the president as the liar-in-chief and America as a criminal aggressor, and the military occupier of a poor country that had not attacked us.

What had changed in the intervening three months to turn Democrats so vehemently against the war they had authorized? The answer can only be found in domestic politics. In those three months, an unknown antiwar candidate named Howard Dean had taken the lead in the primary polls and was looking like a shoe-in for the Democratic presidential nomination. As a result rival candidates who had voted for the war, including eventual nominees Kerry and Edwards, changed their positions 180 degrees and joined the attacks on President Bush. Naturally, the Democrats couldn't admit their attacks were motivated by crass political calculations. Instead, they claimed that they had been deceived by the White House which had manipulated the intelligence on Iraq, persuading them to support the war on false premises.

This allegation was in fact the biggest lie of the war, since Democrats had full access to all U.S. intelligence on Iraq through their seats on the congressional intelligence committees. This intelligence was available to them, in advance of their vote to authorize the use of force. In the months and years that followed, the Democrats added other false charges -- that troops "killed innocent civilians in cold blood," were "terrorizing kids and...women," and had committed atrocities comparable to "Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime."

They rejoiced when news reporters leaked information about national security programs designed to combat the terrorists -- and thus destroyed them. They held up funding for American soldiers on the battlefield, attempted to cut off all funding, and when that failed, tried to tie funding to a timeline that would ensure America's defeat. They openly accused uniformed officers like General David Petraeus of lying about conditions on the ground and hoped against hope that ''this war is lost, and the surge is not accomplishing anything.''

Dissent is legitimate in wartime, but the Democratic Party's opposition to this war went far beyond dissent into unprecedented territory. Fortunately, the Bush administration was able to retrieve its own mistakes and its domestic opponents to win a war that Democrats said was unwinnable and (despite their own authorization) shouldn't have been fought in the first place. But it was no thanks to the Party that now occupies the White House that this American war was won.

URL: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=4AABD85B-82A4-4236-9AF9-2D8D5D482D15

Time To Tell The Truth

“Sen. Barack Obama consistently argues the mission in Afghanistan has suffered as a result of the surge in Iraq. This argument is especially disingenuous considering he is the chairman of the committee designated to oversee the mission in Afghanistan, but he has yet to hold a single hearing,” said Vets for Freedom Chairman Pete Hegseth. “Senator Obama’s dismissive stance towards the surge demonstrates tunnel vision that is concerning to veterans of these conflicts.”
Pete Hegseth Chairman Vets for Freedom

Vets for Freedom (VFF), a nonpartisan organization dedicated to educating policymakers and the American public about the success and strategic importance of the surge in Iraq, today released “Skipped,” the hardest hitting ad in the organization’s continuing effort surrounding the War on Terror.

Former California Governor Pete Wilson, a former Marine Corp. officer, is traveling with VFF leaders this week to announce the ad. The $2.2 million television ad buy will begin nationally with a heavy emphasis in California on September 30th as part of the organization’s national advocacy program “Tell the Truth About the Surge.”

CPAC Saturday:Outside the Wire

I was at CPAC Saturday.
I met Bill Roggio, Jeff Emanuel and JD Johannes.
Very cool stuff.

and Mary Katherine remembered me.

Coalition operations lead to death of al Qaeda terrorist

Since the last video was depressing, here's one via Mudville Gazette that shows our team in action:

"On September 25, 2007, a coordinated air strike by a USAF F-16 killed Abu Usama al Tunisi. Al Tunisi was one of the most important leaders within al Qaeda in Iraq and part of the inner circle of advisors to Abu Ayyub al Masri."