To take some of the sting out of his decision to send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, President Obama laid out an exit strategy by setting a date -- July 2011 -- on which troops will begin withdrawing. The president, through Robert Gibbs, described the date as "locked in," "etched in stone," and having "no flexibility. Troops will start coming home in July, 2011. Period."
Sounds pretty definite.
But just four days later, members of Obama's cabinet were directly contradicting their boss.
Here was Hillary Clinton on NBC's Meet the Press:
We're not talking about an exit strategy or a drop dead deadline. What we're talking about is an assessment that in [July] 2011, we can begin a transition.
And here was Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on the same program:
We're not talking about an abrupt withdrawal. We're talking about something that will take place over a period of time... Because we will have 100,000 troops there. And they are not leaving in July of 2011.
Has an absolute ("Troops will start coming home in July 2011. Period.") ever morphed faster into something as ambiguous, amorphous, and conditional ("an assessment")? Is this the famous "team of rivals" concept we heard so much about in action?
And just in case the lack of clarity wasn't clear, there was Gates again, this time on ABC's This Week:
I don't consider this an exit strategy. And I try to avoid using that term. I think this is a transition.
So even claiming to have an exit strategy is apparently off limits. What we've had over the weekend was the rollout of "Operation Vague Transition That Might, Or More Likely Might Not, Actually Happen in 2011... Or Over Time."
But on Monday Gibbs acted as if Clinton and Gates hadn't actually said what they said. When asked at a briefing with reporters whether U.S. troops could start coming home before July, 2011, Gibbs responded, "It could happen earlier, sure... It won't happen later."
Feeling dizzy yet?
What came through loud and clear from Obama's announcement and the subsequent multiple walkbacks of the notion that we might ever leave Afghanistan -- followed by Gibbs' steadfast certainty that we will on or before July, 2011 -- is that this White House has a serious credibility crisis.
Do they think rebuilding a war-torn tribal nation is going to be possible when they can't even successfully announce a policy to rebuild a war-torn tribal nation? They need an exit strategy for their rollout of an exit strategy.
The optimistic view of Obama's decision to take his time in responding to General McChrystal's request for more troops was that the cerebral president was trying to -- as he promised during the campaign in relation to Iraq -- rethink the mindset that led us into war. After eight years of the war in Afghanistan, with almost every year being more deadly than the last, the American people have certainly changed the way they think about it. In the latest CNN/ORC poll, 51 percent of Americans said they oppose this war.
Despite that consensus, the media continue to frame Afghanistan -- as they do everything else -- in terms of Right vs. Left. And, viewing the president's decision through this prism, they applaud him for "going against his base" and "distancing himself from the Left."
How deeply entrenched is this mindset? So entrenched that even someone as smart and knowledgeable as the New Yorker's Jane Mayer fell back on it during our appearance on MSNBC's Morning Joe. "It's very easy to criticize" Obama's exit plan, she said, adding, "this is true for the Right or the Left." She then briefly channeled Dick Cheney, who she has written so brilliantly about in the past, warning that "if New York is taken out again," Obama will get the blame!
Actually, over the past eight years it's been much easier to cheerlead than to criticize. It's hard to look back at those years and their two wars and conclude that the problem is that we've had too much criticism. Shouldn't decisions that require enormous costs -- in blood as well as resources -- be met with ferocious questioning by the media? Articles sent to academic journals get more rigorous vetting these days than do decisions to escalate wars.
Just look at the inside story of Obama's decision, very positively spun in Sunday's New York Times by Peter Baker. The White House's decision-making process, we are told, was "intense, methodical, rigorous, earnest."
Reading the piece reminded me of the sensation I got when I read Bob Woodward's hagiographic Bush at War: impressed by the level of detail an all-access-pass can get you, but distressed by the utter lack of perspective or independent analysis of the events being described.
I kept thinking of Joan Didion's scathing description of Woodward's reporting as marked by "a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured."
Last week, Baker expressed concern that including new media outlets like HuffPost and Talking Points Memo in the White House press pool rotation could lead to the insertion of ideology into the reporting on the quotidian details of the president's day.
Perhaps he should spend less time worrying about that and more time worrying that his own reportorial "scrupulous passivity" so easily leads to the insertion of the administration's desired spin into the reporting on momentous decisions of war and peace.
Notwithstanding Baker's stenography or Mayer's embrace of the Right/Left mindset, the truth is that opposition to the war has far transcended Right vs. Left. George Will, who in August called for withdrawal from Afghanistan, and who is far from a lefty, recently said that Obama's plan was a replay of "the Bush program, which is, as he used to say, as the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down." For Obama it's "as the Afghans stand up, we'll stand down."
Richard Haass, who was Director of Policy Planning at the State Department for George Bush, was also critical. "Wars are always easier to get into than out of, and this is unlikely to be the exception to that," said Haass on This Week. "But I think it would have to be the triumph of hope over experience to think that if and when we draw down and we go back, say, to pre-surge levels that any improvements will endure."
This is why Haass' piece in the latest Newsweek is entitled "No Exit." For Haass, "the strategist with the most to say about the current U.S. foreign-policy predicament may be Jean-Paul Sartre." Given that we're trying to nation-build -- without, of course, calling it nation-building -- in a nation that has proven impervious to nation-building, perhaps Kafka would have even more to say.
Tom Friedman, also nobody's lefty, captured the Kafka-esque quality of our ill-defined mission:
"To put it succinctly," he wrote in the New York Times on Sunday, "this only has a chance to work if Karzai becomes a new man, if Pakistan becomes a new country and if we actually succeed at something the president says we won't be doing at all: nation-building in Afghanistan. Yikes!"
Judging from his speech at West Point, Obama apparently thought that if he just explained his plan in an impassive, matter-of-fact way, reality would bend itself to his crisp, orderly tone. But Afghanistan is the antithesis of orderly.
Want proof? Check out this Pentagon schematic of the U.S.'s counter-insurgency strategy that NBC's Richard Engel dug up. Warning: it's NSFS (Not Safe for Sanity)
Writing on HuffPost, David Bromwich posited that Obama "is almost convinced of the omnipotence of words. When once he has persuaded himself of a thing -- that it is true, or that it is plausible and might become true -- the words that embody his conviction have for him the quality of deeds already done."
Does that sound familiar? Not only is Obama continuing Bush's war, he's continuing his method of Magical Thinking: the idea that simply saying something is true is the same as its being true. We're getting more eloquent words this time, to be sure, but the same tragic result: endless wars of choice.
Gates and Clinton now claim that July, 2011 isn't really an actual exit date. Sadly, I believe them. Obama isn't distancing himself from "the Left" with his decision to escalate this deepening disaster. He's distancing himself from the national interests of the country.
Follow Arianna Huffington on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ariannahuff
This article has some interesting points on the subject:
http://thepoliticizer.com/2009/12/20/goldin-war-is-over-if-you-want-it/
Second, it is in Pakistan's interest to keep the Taliban in Afghanistan. They do not want a strong Afghanistan in their back yard and as long as the Taliban exists, we are so stupid we will keep giving the Pakistani's billions each year.
Unfortunately our Military has already succumbed and surrendered to the might and invincibility of the Taliban...the best they hope for is too "degrade" their forces...that's the best our Generals can offer...
America the World's Greatest Military Super Power cannot defeat 25-30,000 Taliban...that's from our top wonderful great Generals...
Our Military has no military solution to defeat the Taliban fighting forces and or their ability to organize and fight...
$600,000,000,000.00 per year and The Pentagon can't defeat a force of 25-30,000 tops....LOL....!
the WMD war was fake from the start -despite blair
Huffington is as dumb as when she was married to that idiot
she converses well but has no understanding of what is going on.
I did not say there was one,
I did not say it was a good move to send 30k
i did not say they needed NO end game
It is FUBAR , thank you Bush and Blair
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/sartre-meets-afghanistan_b_383529.html#
DUH!!
With no legitimate government?And the troops are broken.
Via Sullivan.....
Not Home In Time For Christmas
U.S. Army infantry captain Tim Hsia quotes his counterpart in the unit who was returning home as Hsia was shipping out:
He told me he had a feeling his unit would be extended but that despite it all, his unit handled it better then the unit it had replaced. “When they were told they were extended, some of the soldiers had already flown back home. The Army made those soldiers come back after hugging their families, and extended them another three months. Well, what do you think? A lot of people in that unit just mentally gave up. They were physically here but mentally and spiritually elsewhere."
When Obama gave his "Just War" sermon to the Nobel Peace Prize audience in Sweden, you could see the silent dismay in various member's faces. I think some in the audience must had felt absolutely "duped". How can the creditability of the Nobel Peace Prize be maintained when it's newest recipient is escalating violence in Afghanistan. The Nobel committee should have made a stand and withdrawn it's award to Obama. (I know, they being good Swedes and such, that ain't going to happen.) I think, that in the discrete halls of the Noble Peace Prize, Obama will be a continual reminder to "never give such a brilliant Symbol of Peace to anyone until Peace has been delivered."
(I know, they being good Norwegians and such, that ain't going to happen.)
Who would have thought (back in the Middle Ages), that the descendants of Vikings would become the world's champions for Peace.
Republicans passed a poison cup to Obama & have never faced accountability.
Libs will criticize, and eventually wear down the first true hope we've had for change in this country under the guise of "keeping his feet in the fire", just in time for the conservatives to swoop in & take credit for the hard work Obama is doing.
To all real Obama supporters we've got to get active and work twice as hard as before because apparently liberals, especially here on huffpo have officially joined ranks with Rush Limpaugh who has stated publicly that he wants Obama to fail. I just didn't think liberals would be doing the heavy lifting to make Rush's wish a reality.
You were so worked up about being anti-Bush that you wanted ALL of his policies rescinded without worry of consequences.
You aren't living in the land of reality!
The exit strategy is at least more coherent and clear. The only problem is I don't believe one word of it.
I can't decicde if I'm more afraid that the President actually BELIEVES what he says........
Or that he's actively lying to us about his intentions........ like his predecessor.
The same principles that caused me to campaign for, contribute to, and fully support this President
promt me now to rise and say an unequivocal "NO!" to this tragedy-in-the-making.
Obama is said to be a constitutional scholar, would that he was an historian.
When he insists that The Afghan war is NOT like Vietnam does he really believe that?
Does he think WE do?
The opium fields of southwest asia remind me of some rice paddies we were obliged to slog through in south-EAST Asia some forty years ago.
And this President is determined, yet again, to squander the chance to effect a "Great Society" at home, in order to RADICALLY expand an inherited, ill-advised, and unwinnable war.....in order so as not to be seen as "soft" on communism.....terrorism.....or whatever "ism" requires the futile sacrifice of still MORE patriotic young Americans' lives.
NO!.....no, no, NO!
U.S. OUT OF AFGHANISTAN
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS AND THEIR FAMILIES
BRING EM HOME
tm