Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Incoherence in Afghanistan

I suspect it's probably too late to do much about it, but I would feel remiss not warning again and again that escalating U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan is almost the epitome of a stupid, sure-to-fail policy. I called it incoherent in my column this week for Antiwar.com, but perhaps didn't pinpoint what is most egregious about Obama's policy. Instead of developing a coherent policy based on a real analysis of the situation on the ground, he compromised between possible policies -- all-out aggressive counter-terrorism and a counterinsurgency strategy involving security and lots of nation-building-confidence-building and chose a bit of both. The most egrgeious aspect is that he was compromising not between two approaches favored by different sections of the public, but by different factions within the government. It's bureaucrats (military and civilian) he feels he has to appease. Americans and Afghans will die because U.S. government bureaucrats can't admit they might have been wrong so we have to "finish what we started." Utterly immoral!