l****z
发帖数: 29846 | 1 Krauthammer轰奥巴马：什么样的指挥官会把数以万计的部队派到战场，同时宣布一个
固定的时间撤
兵？一个根本不想打赢的人只是在被迫作出政治姿态
Why Is He Sending Them?
President Obama lacks the will to fight in Afghanistan.
From the beginning, the call to arms was highly uncertain. On Dec. 1, 2009,
commander-in-chief Barack Obama orders 30,000 more Americans into battle in
Afghanistan. But in the very next sentence, he announces that an American
withdrawal will begin after 18 months.
Astonishing. A surge of troops — overall, Obama has tripled our Afghan
force
— with a declaration not of war, but of ambivalence. Nine months later,
Marine Corps Commandant James Conway admitted that this decision was
“probably giving our enemy sustenance.” This wasn’t conjecture, he
insisted,
but the stuff of intercepted Taliban communications testifying to their
relief that they simply had to wait out the Americans.
What kind of commander in chief sends tens of thousands of troops to war
while announcing in advance a fixed date for beginning their withdrawal? One
who doesn’t have his heart in it. One who doesn’t really want to win but
is
making some kind of political gesture. One who thinks he has to be seen as
trying but is preparing the ground — meaning, the political cover — for
failure.
Until now, the above was just inference from the president’s public
rhetoric. No longer. Now we have the private quotes. Bob Woodward’s book,
Obama’s Wars, drawing on classified memos and interviews with scores of
national-security officials, has Obama telling his advisers: “I want an
exit
strategy.” He tells the country publicly that Afghanistan is a “vital
national interest,” but he tells his generals that he will not do the kind
of patient institution-building that is the very essence of the
counterinsurgency strategy that Generals McChrystal and Petraeus crafted and
that he himself adopted.
Moreover, he must find an exit because “I can’t lose the whole Democratic
party.” This admission is the most crushing of all.
First, isn’t this the party that in two consecutive presidential campaigns
—
John Kerry’s and then Obama’s — argued vociferously that Afghanistan was
the
good war, the right war, the war of necessity, the central front in the War
on Terror? Now, after acceding to power and being given charge of that very
war, Obama confides that he must retreat lest that very same party abandon
him. What happened in the interim? Did it suddenly develop a faint heart? Or
was the party disingenuous about the Afghan war all along, using it as a
convenient club with which to attack George W. Bush over Iraq, while
protecting Democrats from the charge of being reflexively antiwar? |
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