Dithering?

Well, here is the question. Is President Obama “dithering” on Afghanistan? Lots of people certainly think so. I personally do not believe it. I think he knows exactly what he wants to do there. I also think he has managed to play himself into a corner where he isn’t going to get to do what he was planning on doing and has to make some new choices.

My opinion is that he deliberately delayed announcing a decision on Afghanistan because he didn’t want to announce an up tick in the war just as he was asking the left wing of his party to abandon their long sought after “Public Option” The irregularities in the Afghan election gave him the perfect opportunity to delay an announcement on the war until health care was done. Unfortunately for the Pres, the Afghan election worked itself out and health care still isn’t done. In fact it looks increasingly like it is not going to get done any time soon at all.

The use of the “Election Fraud”* in Afghanistan as an excuse to not make a decision was a particularly cynical and, dare I say it, dishonest ploy. It is not as if either of the two candidates would have said “nope, we don’t want you anymore, get out.” Both Abdullah Abdullah and Hamid Karzai would have continued the fight and needed our support so it would not have made any difference in theater if he had committed to sending more troops. In fact, I think it would have helped because it would send a signal that whoever won we were there to back them up and help. But instead we look like we are “dithering” and we look like we are strong arming the Afghan government (which we are)

Now of course with the slow down on health care Obama has to continue placating the left wing of his party so they don’t push for the whole nationalized health plan they really want and thus split away those Democratic members of the House and Senate who know they will not get re-elected if they were to vote for such a bill. Since this same left wing is now increasingly opposed to the war in Afghanistan ( I predicted this a couple of years ago, as soon as it looks like the anti war guys get what they wanted in Iraq they would then turn against the War in Afghanistan which they used to say as the “good”, “real”, or Important” war.) Now Obama has to avoid stepping up the war too much in Afghanistan to keep these flakes happy but not so much so that everything over there falls apart. What I am afraid of is that the President will listen to some of these people who say we should go around the government of Afghanistan and use the Warlords to fight the war. This would work. For us. It would be a disaster for Afghanistan. It would roll things right back to the situation there Post Soviet occupation. And we could start looking at another generation of the same type of chaos that led to the rise of the Taliban in the first place.


* Election fraud. So what. I mean really, that election was no more fraudulent than any other election run within 1000 miles of Kabul. Pakistan faces the same kind of issues in every election, Iran just declares winners and makes up votes for them, the Various former soviet –stans sort of pretend to hold fair elections, China makes no remote claim to them. Why, or even better, HOW, in the hell can we expect a country with no democratic tradition, peopled by cultures that operate on tribal seniority, to hold a real election on their second try. We certainly didn’t get it right that fast. Hell, if you ask the Democratic whiners we didn’t hold legitimate election in two of the last three. But theses sanctimonious geeks will condemn Afghanistan because, as is their tradition, the tribal elders decide who the tribe wants and put than many votes in the box.

They all disgust me.