Obama’s Afghan plan has no exit strategy
President Barack Obama has decided to escalate the war in Afghanistan.
That’s the take home message from the President’s major policy speech on the topic this morning. Calling the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan “increasingly perilous”, Obama pledged to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future.’’
17,000 more American soldiers and Marines are already headed to the region, with an additional 4,000 troops being sent to “train” the Afghan and Pakistani security forces.
Will this Afghan Surge work?
What concerns me is it’s not clear what mission, specifically, these additional troops are supposed to accomplish and how we will know when their job is done.
"When the president talks about 'defeating' Al Qaeda, it is crucial to ask what exactly that means. Does it mean killing every last member of Al Qaeda?” asks Sonali Kolhatkar, co-director of the Afghan Women’s Mission and author of the book, Bleeding Afghanistan.
If so, it means we could be at war in Afghanistan for decades, mired in the same kind of long term occupation of a country that eventually destroyed the Soviet Union.
A white paper released by the Administration Friday attempts to address these concerns. The six-page White House document delineates four “realistic and achievable objectives": distrupting terrorist networks, promoting effective government in Afghanistan, developing self-reliant Afghan security forces, and involving the United Nations.
But there’s no exit strategy in the document, which means the troops may never come home from a war that can never be won.
For a President who criticized George W, Bush for failing to plan for the long-term in Iraq, Barack Obama seems to be making a frighteningly similar mistake in Afghanistan
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Obama’s Afghan plan has no exit strategy
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