rssMore on Gates the Swing Voter
Thursday, October 01, 2009 at 9:54 am
- 2 Comments
The official readout from yesterday’s White House meeting on Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy was predictably uninformative. (“When it come to decisions as important as keeping this country safe and putting our troops into harm’s way, the President has made it clear that he will rigorously assess our progress,” etc.) But remember how I called Defense Secretary Robert Gates the key swing vote on Afghanistan, and how he’s achieved that position by remaining a persuadable skeptic on an Afghanistan escalation? Yochi Dreazen at The Wall Street Journal has more:
In an interview Wednesday, a senior defense official said that Defense Secretary Robert Gates now worries that counterinsurgency might no longer be a viable approach for countering the Taliban violence roiling once-stable parts of north and west Afghanistan.
I’m not sure I buy that Gates is actually backing off counterinsurgency, but I certainly buy that he’s setting a high-but-not-unclearable bar for some of the COIN crowd’s favored prescriptions; and definitely that he reiterated longstanding skepticism that a warheads-on-foreheads counterterrorism strategy will work.
Follow Spencer Ackerman on Twitter
2 Comments
Comment posted October 3, 2009 @ 2:20 am
There’s an old saying that a camel is a horse designed by committee and there’s a real danger that as a result of this ‘group-think’ regarding strategy in Afghanistan, the situation will be muddied and wrong steps will be taken. The mission in Afghanistan must be to eradicate al Qaeda. Although al Qaeda and its ideology of global jihad may be in a decline, it is regrouping unmolested in parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan. While in the north defensive/garrison type operations may continue to be conducted in the short term, the south and south-east is Taliban country and the Taliban protect al Qaeda. In the present circumstances, Kharzai’s notion of parleying with the Taliban is ludicrous—why would they parley when they are winning? the US should deploy at least 150,000 combat troops into Afghanistan to secure all borders—that includes the Swat Valley (with Pakistan’s involvement) and the provinces of Khost, Paktia and Paktika —and conduct counter insurgency operations over a period of 180 days to achieve Enduring Freedom’s mission, after which all troops should be pulled out—in, win, and get out quick. With PSYOPS propaganda and construction engineers in the cleared villages following up the search and destroy missions, just watch the Taliban give up on el Qaeda—the real enemy.
Trackback posted September 7, 2011 @ 8:08 am
Related……
[...]just beneath, are numerous totally not related sites to ours, however, they are surely worth going over[...]……
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
