Word: mcchrystal
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Afghanistan's fraudulent elections complicate President Obama's job as he weighs a recommendation from General Stanley McChrystal, his top commander there, to send as many as 40,000 additional troops to support a beefed-up counterinsurgency strategy. But for that strategy to work, the U.S. needs a credible Afghan partner, which Afghanistan's elections now seem unlikely to produce. (See pictures from election day in Afghanistan...
...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...
...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, I'm told; the low option was 10,000 troops, and the middle one was 25,000. When Presidents are offered a menu like that, we know what they usually pick. I'd be willing to bet that the plan Gelb laid out is close to what...
...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...