Obama Wages War in Afghanistan: Exit Strategy Before "Victory"

Obama plays games with national security and lives.

In war you’re either in it to win or you will be guaranteed to lose.  “Winning” does not always mean crushing the enemy and reducing them to cinders.  While the Korean War cannot be said to have been a victory the way WWII was for the Allies, it did result in a truce (technically the Korean War was never ended) which allowed South Korea to develop into a stable, vibrant nation.  of course, ten of thousands of Americans have been based in Korea since the 1950s and the promise of severe retaliation against North Korea should they attack their neighbors to the south didn’t hurt, either.

Before D-Day took place General Eisenhower wrote two letters… one praising the success of the event, the other in case it failed.  D-Day nearly failed many times on that June 6th but the contents of that letter of failure was not released and did not become public until much later…

Looking at all of the public hand-wringing going on with the Democrats and the Obama administration regarding a “surge” in Afghanistan, it is as if Obama has written a letter of failure and released it already (without having his success letter).  How else to take these comments by the Obama White House:

“Throughout this process the president has repeated pushed and prodded not simply for how are we going to get a certain number of troops in, but what is the strategy, what has to be implemented ultimately to get them out,” Gibbs said.

With President Obama considering up to 30,000 additional troops for Afghanistan, it is irresponsible for him to talk about our exit strategy publicly.  There are a few reasons why this is not only tactically unsound but illogical as well.

From a tactical perspective one can imagine two parties bidding at an auction for a Monet painting.  One party keeps their maximum bid to themselves while the other party openly says: “I will bid no more than $15 million for this painting.”  The party who keeps their maximum bid to themselves can then simply wait until the bidding reaches $15,000,000.01 and win the auction (assuming they have enough money).  And so it is with war.  Letting the enemy know you are already looking for a way out before you’ve done anything gives them the advantage and places any resources you are willing to employ (money, troops, equipment, etc…) needlessly in harm’s way.  Money and equipment can be replaced, troops’ lives cannot.  And thus it appears by already showing yourself to be looking for a way out you are needlessly wasting the lives of our brave armed forces.  To make matters worse, this is all being done by Obama for shallow political purposes:

Top Democrats have made it clear to Obama that he will not receive a friendly reception should he announce what is considered the leading option: sending 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan.

The problem is that on the campaign trail Obama was singing a very different tune (when he was attacking President Bush):

‘This is not a war of choice,” Barack Obama told the Veterans of Foreign Wars on Aug. 17. “This is a war of necessity.

“Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al-Qaida would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people.”

They are prepared to wait as long as necessary to win.

 And where were all of the Democrats arguing against Obama’s “good war” rhetoric in Afghanistan?  Exactly… there was only silence.  Now that Obama is president, Democrats are coming out of the woodwork making it clear that they want the U.S. out of Afghanistan immediately:

In June, Pelosi strong-armed anti-war Democrats into voting for a $100 billion measure to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. During an interview in July, she recounted her appeal to the lawmakers: “Will you change your mind and one more time vote for war funding?” She also promised not to ask again. “This is the very last time,” she told them.

Obama seems to think that he can simply plug in all of the inputs of “making war” and get his neat and tidy answer as to how things will go.  Logically, this is unsupportable as war never follows neat and tidy inputs.  And judging by Obama’s pattern of making bold statements but backing off from them once the reality of the situation sets in, it is doubtful that drawing a line in the sand as to what will trigger our exit strategy will actually be carried out should the situation turn messy (it already has).

You have presidential candidate Obama promising the world with regards to Afghanistan while you have President Obama backtracking on a matter of national security and principle.  Meanwhile you have anti-war Democrats and their Doyen of Dystopia, Nancy Pelosi, having promised she will not ask for funding any more.

And all this time you have American troops putting their lives on the line and our enemies waiting us out.

Finally, to make matters even worse we have the callous financial argument being made as to why we should exit Afghanistan:

Several top Democrats in Congress have raised concerns about the costs of sending more troops.  As Democratic House Appropriations Chairman David Obey (D-WI) recently told ABC News, “We ain’t going to have no money for nothing if we pour it all into Afghanistan.”

Gibbs said the President shares those concerns and is keenly aware of the costs of sending more troops.

“Look guys, it’s a million dollars a troop per year – 10,000 troops is 10 billion dollars.   That’s in addition to what we already spend in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Gibbs said.  “It’s very, very, very expensive.”

This argument would not be so disgustingly self-serving had the Democrats and the Obama administration not done such a great job of exploding our national debt and throwing hundreds of billions of dollars out the window “creating” jobs that never were and bailing out automakers to help the unions or screwing up the financial system so much that employers are too afraid to hire people thus contributing to more unemployment and a longer recession.

One can only hope that our country will not be in too much of a shambles for the next president to put things back into order.

Is Superman available for office?