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A show of hands -- who\'s really shocked that President Obama
made the decision to commit 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan?
If you raised your hand, you\'re either incredibly naive or you
weren\'t listening particularly closely during last year\'s
presidential campaign. It\'s not so much what Obama said then as what
he didn\'t say: He talked a lot about withdrawing from Iraq -- a war
that was arrogant, unabashed folly from day one -- but never mentioned
pulling out of Afghanistan. Those on the left who are now gnashing
their teeth about how cheated they feel -- how their dreams of a great
progressive utopia have been sacrificed on the altar of Obama\'s
attempts at centrism and the fruitless appeasement of his political
enemies -- would be wise to remember all the times they conveniently
held Afghanistan up as an example of a supposedly \just war\ in an
effort to contrast Bush\'s Iraq adventure as the ultimate \unjust
war.\ As in: \Why aren\'t we focusing all our attention on
Afghanistan, the Taliban and bin Laden, instead of wasting time, lives
and money in Iraq? Huh? Huh?\
The fact is that Afghanistan, and by proxy Pakistan, remains the main
front, if there is such a thing, in the war against the entity that
attacked us on 9/11; it\'s where we should\'ve been concentrating
every ounce of our military and strategic effort all along, before we
allowed a bunch of neo-con assholes bent on remaking the Middle East
in our image -- or at least Halliburton\'s -- to distract us in Iraq.
Afghanistan is an unfinished fight and, as much as it hurts beyond
belief to say this, it\'s one that will result in a whole lot of
American kids having died in vain if we don\'t at the very least
attempt to tie it up in as respectable a bow as is possible in a place
that exists at the ass end of the world.
Would it be nice to pull all the troops out and bring them home and
would we all love to see that more than anything? Absolutely. Is it
realistic, given not simply the fight we started there eight years ago
-- the fight we had every right to start -- but the way we abandoned
Afghanistan 25 years ago, silently intervening in that country\'s war
against the Soviets then leaving it to pick up the pieces on its own
in the aftermath? No, it isn\'t. It\'s common knowledge by this point
that we helped to create Osama bin Laden and the Taliban through our
arming of Afghanistan\'s mujahadeen in their holy war against the
Soviet invaders. If you still subscribe to what Colin Powell once
cynically touted as the \Pottery Barn\ rule of nation building -- \You
break it, you bought it\ -- then Afghanistan has been our war for
almost three decades.
And that\'s something the conflict-addicted jerk-offs in the media
need to remember before they giddily jump on what we\'re already
seeing is a rapidly advancing meme in the wake of tonight\'s address
by Obama: that with this escalation, Afghanistan is no longer Bush\'s
war but \Obama\'s War.\
That\'s horseshit. It was never really Bush\'s war, and it certainly
isn\'t Obama\'s war; it\'s America\'s war. The Reagan administration
was at one time as knee-deep in the impenetrable caves and valleys of
Afghanistan as the Soviets were -- the difference being that the U.S.
wasn\'t on the ground attempting to conquer the Afghans -- and because
of its negligence post-Russian invasion, our tenuous erstwhile allies
evolved to become our greatest threat in the Middle East and Asia, if
not on the entire planet. Our decision to attack Afghanistan and
attempt to drive out the enemies that we\'d ironically created was the
right one -- especially after 9/11. The eventual result of this
conflict likely won\'t be a perfectly stable state, and it damn sure
won\'t be one that\'s free of corruption, not with the Karzai
government in charge. But if the Taliban really were allowed to regain
a measure of legitimate control within the Afghan borders --
particularly with Pakistan being the bubbling cauldron of crazy that
it is -- then we\'d have spent the past eight years there for almost
nothing.
As painful as it is to accept and as much as it seems antithetical to
what many believe they were promised during the campaign, Obama knows
this. He made a tough choice -- the least terrible one from a series
of options that were all terrible in some form.
Let\'s just pray we really can push forward and get out with as few
lives lost as possible.
Although that may be the naivest hope of all.
This news story was reported by Huffington Post 4 minutes ago
* Read the full article at Huffington Post:
http://bit.ly/4oSDYp
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