Have your cake and eat it too
The President went for the bigger, faster drawdown option in his speech this evening. I commented on The World.
He has tried hard to limit the mission, but it is still an open question whether the Afghans will be ready to take over security responsibility for the country by 2014. He showed no sign that he believes their governance will improve, and he made only passing reference to the economy. Nation-building, he said, is what we should do in the United States. That pretty much sinks the civilian side of the Afghanistan effort, except for “the political settlement.” That I suppose is whatever comes out of the reconciliation efforts with the Taliban.
The President was keen in Iraq on the idea that a timeline would get the Iraqis to stand up to their responsibilities, a strategy that I think worked. So was Leon Panetta during the Iraq Study Group. It looks to me as if they are trying to reproduce that (relative) success, just as they tried to reproduce the (relative) success of the surge. The difference is on the Afghan side of the equation–Kabul seems a lot less ready to take over, and less able to get ready to take over, than Baghdad ever did.
Of course the withdrawal announced tonight is only of the “surge” troops and would leave about 68,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, twice the number there at the beginning of the Administration. So the President is getting his cake and eating it too. He is offering the Congress (and the American people) a bigger and faster drawdown than anticipated while keeping a substantial number of troops in Afghanistan, albeit fewer than Petraeus, Mullen and Gates seem to have wanted. But they get to decide who comes home first–you bet it won’t be anyone they think particularly useful.
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