Word: afghanistans
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...Obama has made some mistakes on Afghanistan, and so has the military, but having a six-month strategic review is not one of them. No doubt, the President should have spoken with McChrystal more than once over the summer. The military's mistake was going ahead with a flawed battle plan that did not secure Kandahar, the second largest Afghan city and the fulcrum of the insurgency. That mistake made the six-month strategy review necessary, as did two other factors: the disastrously corrupt Afghan presidential election and a vastly improved capability to gather intelligence on al-Qaeda, which...
...fact, most of the hoo-hah about Obama's Afghanistan strategy review has been a matter of smoke and mirrors. In a recent issue of this magazine, for example, Leslie H. Gelb - a prominent "opponent" of the current strategy - came out against the military's all-in option in Afghanistan, favoring instead a plan that would add three brigades, about 15,000 additional troops, this year. But the military's all-in option, a request for 40,000 more troops, is just that: an option. It is the upper end of three options that McChrystal has offered the President...
...President as flaccid on national security. McCain has been going around for the past few weeks telling all comers - heatedly, at times - that Obama's strategy review is essentially a waste of time, that the President has to, has to, go with the 40,000-troop option in Afghanistan. The Obama Administration, unnecessarily defensive, added fuel to the fire by having National Security Adviser Jim Jones and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates obliquely chastise McChrystal for public lobbying...
...shame that smoke and puffery have obscured McChrystal's excellent speech. Those who speak of winning or losing in Afghanistan are using a primordial vocabulary. But the essential humanity at the heart of the counterinsurgency strategy - the idea that we succeed if we work at helping people - makes it worth trying. As the man said, this is about humility. In the 21st century, real power may be all about figuring out the right place to dig a well...
...TIME's video on soldiers' experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq...