Blogito, Ergo Sum
by Gregg Calkins
1 December 2009, a Tuesday
Finally, a decision of some sort about Afghanistan:
...Mr. Obama concluded that the situation required “more, sooner,” as one official said, explaining the some of the central conclusions Mr. Obama reached at the end of a nearly three-month review...
I think he got it backwards; the usually military maneuver is “hurry up...and wait.”
Oh, hang on a sec...this is what the NYT tells us Obama is going to say, he hasn’t said it yet. Clearly Obama had a lot of thinking to do before making up his mind about his new tactics.
The new strategy draws heavily on lessons learned from President George W. Bush’s “surge” and strategy shift in Iraq in 2007, which Mr. Obama opposed as a senator and presidential candidate.
Uh...you mean the lessons had already been learned? Isn’t Obama going to do anything different?
However officials said that Mr. Obama in his speech will give a time frame — something Mr. Bush did not do —for when the United States will start pulling the reinforcements out and begin turning over security responsibilities to Afghan forces one province at a time.
Ah. A big difference, indeed. And what will the time frame be? Short, of course...right?
Mr. Obama’s aides would not say how specific he would be on Tuesday night about the time frame of the American presence.
What? A non-specific time frame? No hint at all?
But clearly it would be well more than a year.
What makes that clear to the New York Times, I wonder?
That would take him to 2011 or 2012 — when Mr. Obama is up for re-election — before the troop levels would begin to fall again to fulfill the president’s oft-repeated assertion that he would offer no “open-ended commitment” to the Afghan government.
Ah...in time to reduce them for his re-election campaign and fulfill his oft-repeated assertion.
...administration officials said that without the accelerated deployment, there was little hope of being able to stabilize the situation in the region sufficiently to start withdrawals.
“This is to speed the process,” one said.
Doing this three months earlier would have helped a hell of a lot, he didn’t add...or even dare think.
...Mr. Obama is trying a new approach, pairing newly-deployed American troops with specific Afghan units. ...
In addition to the influx of troops, administration officials said they are taking other lessons from the Iraq surge, such as empowering local security forces to stand up to Taliban militants in their communities and enhancing the training of national forces by embedding American troops with Afghan counterparts and later pairing similarly sized American and Afghan units to fight side by side.
“We learned a lot of lessons, painful lessons, out of Iraq on how to do training,” said one official involved in the discussions.
A new approach, somehow. I was trying to ponder this interpretation, remembering how Senator Obama predicted that President Bush’s proposed surge in Iraq would make things worse than before, not better, when I realized that the cause of my dizziness was the result of my brain not spinning at the same RPM as what I was reading. No wonder. Let’s try it now:
The lengthy process that led to Mr. Obama’s decision started out with sharp disagreements among his top advisers, but administration officials said that the intensive reviews and discussions ultimately led the participants to coalesce around the new strategy. ...
Along the way...the intelligence community produced nearly three dozen fresh assessments of various related issues, like who the enemy was, where they were concentrated, what their capabilities were, what would happen under certain circumstances — including political collapse in Pakistan — and what a “game changer” would be in the war.
The central mission of the new strategy is the same as described by the White House after its last review in March...
I’m straining as hard as I can to understand the new strategy which is going to achieve the same central mission, surely there must be a “but” in here somewhere...
Mr. Obama has sought to narrow America’s mission. There will be no talk of turning Afghanistan into a democracy — one of Mr. Bush’s central goals — and no discussion of “nation-building,” the officials said.
Ah. Afghanistan will be returned to Warlord control?
But as they described it, some rudimentary nation-building is part of the plan, including helping the central government improve governance and curb corruption. Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, has made such promises in the past and never delivered; since he took office last month following an election marked by widespread fraud, he has made a series of new commitments to the United States, officials insist.
Ah. We’re going to do it, at least in some rudimentary fashion, but we aren’t going to talk about it being one of our central goals, just in case we fail?
Maybe I’ll understand this better after I hear the speech?
Or maybe I just don’t understand things any more. Like Tiger Woods, who isn’t charged with anything and isn’t talking but the NYT reports:
Woods has retained a prominent criminal defense lawyer in Central Florida, Mark NeJame.
How does the NYT know this? They don’t say. Why did he do it? They don’t even hint. Another job for the National Enquirer?