Little America: Listening to Biden and that dick Eickenberry

The Washington Post reveals an excerpt from Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s book due out this week entitled “Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan” which illustrates that which I’ve been saying from the beginning about Obama’s lack of commitment to the surge in Afghanistan causing it’s failure. From the Associated Press report on the book;

Obama purposely did not read a grim CIA assessment of Afghanistan that found little measurable benefit from the 30,000 “surge” forces Obama eventually approved, the book quotes a U.S. official as saying.

A previously undisclosed Biden memo to Obama in November 2009 reflects his view that military commanders were asking Obama to take a leap by adding tens of thousands of forces whose role was poorly defined.

Although Biden’s doubts have become well known, the new book details how Biden used a months-long White House review of the war to question the basic premise that the same “counterinsurgency” strategy that had apparently worked in Iraq could be applied to Afghanistan.

“I do not see how anyone who took part in our discussions could emerge without profound questions about the viability of counterinsurgency,” Biden wrote to Obama.

The reason Bush’s surge in Iraq worked was because he demonstrated that the US was committed to winning in Iraq. Despite the fact that Republicans and Bush lost the 2006 election, Bush announced the surge days after the election. While Democrats, IVAW, Vote Vets, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi worked to undermine the impact of the troops against the insurgency, those insurgents realized that they couldn’t stand against the US determination to kill them and they decided their best bet was to join us in destroying the foreign fighters in Iraq.

The Obama Administration lacked that determination. Eager to seek a political solution that wouldn’t anger their base too much, the Obama Administration sought a compromise on commitment instead, which signaled to the Taliban that they could wait us out. Despite the fact that the CIA said that 30,000 troops wouldn’t have that much impact on the Taliban, Biden, the smartest man in the room, wanted the number capped at 20,000. Even that dick Eikenberry gave the Taliban hope;

[Ambassador to Afghanistan, that dick Karl] Eikenberry, a former top Army general who had served in Afghanistan, said more forces would only delay the time when Afghans would take over responsibility for their own security.

The Eikenberry memo was leaked shortly after he sent it, and confirmed by U.S. officials. Biden was presumed to agree with it, but he stayed mum at the time.

Obama’s compromise – 30,000 additional forces and a deadline to begin bringing them home – was intended to blunt the momentum of a resurgent Taliban insurgency without committing Obama to an open-ended war.

Their strategy from the beginning was withdrawal – if the war had appeared open-ended, it might have dissuaded the Taliban from continuing a fight which had no end, as it looked to the Iraq insurgency in 2006. But Obama, Biden and Eikenberry blew it. they were more scared of an open-ended war than the Taliban. The Obama Administration blinked.

The first wave of the insurgency surge, 17,000 Marines, were sent to Helmand. from the Washington Post’s excerpt;

“Can someone tell me why the Marines were sent to Helmand?” the incredulous McChrystal asked his officers.

The answer — not fully known at the time to McChrystal and his officers — would reveal the dysfunction of the U.S. war effort: a reliance on understaffed NATO partners for crucial intelligence, a misjudgment of Helmand’s importance to Afghanistan’s security, and tribal politics within the Pentagon that led the Marines to insist on confining themselves to a far less important patch of desert.

Kind of reminds you of Lyndon Johnson plotting targets in Hanoi, doesn’t it? So the Obama Administration ignored the CIA recommendations along with the tactical expertise of their commander on the ground to fight the wrong war in the wrong way – depending on Joe Biden’s ninja robot zombies. Joe Biden who has been on the wrong side of every foreign policy debate since he got to the Senate. The smartest guy in his own head.

Yeah, we need four more years of this crowd.

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Terror War