Handed a top-to-bottom review of, and a revised strategy for, this long-ignored front in the Global War on Terror by the outgoing Bush administration, President Barack Obama stepped to the microphone in February and gave a platitudinous speech that echoed precisely what his predecessor had said in the last months of his own presidency. When that speech alone failed to miraculously make the war in Afghanistan simply go away, Obama spent months dithering over whether or not he should give another Afghan strategy speech (as American troops and Afghan civilians were dying at a rate higher than they had been at any point in the conflict).

Finally, when the problem again refused to just go away on its own, Obama succumbed to public demand that he actually say something about the troops, and the war, he has responsibility for in Afghanistan as America’s commander in chief. Fortunately, he had amazing resources (besides brilliant military brass like David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal) to rely on in his decision-making process in the form of a host of lessons learned over the last six years in Iraq. With so recent an example of so much not to do in a war, Obama couldn’t help but learn from previous mistakes and make a sound decision on Afghanistan….right?

If only we were so lucky as to have a President who actually recognized that history existed before January 20, 2009 — something that he and his administration simply refuse to do (with the sole exception to that rule being the amazingly unprofessional and unpresidential non-stop banging of the “blame-everything-on-my-predecessor” drum).

Stepping to the microphone last night at West Point, President Barack Obama, Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces (and supposedly extraordinarily intelligent individual), laid out a strategy for Afghanistan that embraced every single thing that went wrong in Iraq over the last six years (particularly the bloody 2004-06 period), and that avoided implementing any of the tactics that actually made that western front in the GWOT the rousing success it is today.

Pull back to large bases and defend only major cities? Check. Send too few troops to protect themselves and the civilian population — let alone to successfully defeat the enemy while building necessary infrastructure and supporting a new, issue-plagued government? Check. (This is yet another major issue, as Afghanistan is geographically larger and more forbidding than Iraq, which is the size of California to Afghanistan’s Texas — not even mentioning the Hindu Kush mountains.) Fail to accompany that increase in troop levels with a workable change in strategy, designed to maximize those troops’ effectiveness and to accomplish a clearly defined mission (rather than simply sending over more American men and women to serve as cannon fodder)? Check. Fail to clearly define the mission in the first place, and to define victory in any way? Check. Demand that members of the indigenous population put themselves and their families at risk standing beside a force that they suspect will be abandoning them to severe repercussions in the near future? Check. Provide timelines to the enemy, so that they know how long it will be before the one superior fighting force in that nation will be departing, and leaving the country to them once again? Check.

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Four more US Soldiers died in Afghanistan yesterday as we continued to wait anxiously for Obama to make up his mind about how to respond to General McChrystal’s report. During the pre-surge days in Iraq, 4 dead soldiers was enough for every major news outlet to scream from the rooftops about the costs of war. Now? Hardly a whisper.

Why is it so hard, Mr. President, to DO something about Afghanistan-even if you have to adjust your strategy again later-given that doing NOTHING has only gained you more fallen heroes? Since taking office, YOUR casualty count is nearly DOUBLE that of George Bush’s worst year as Commander in Chief. Why? Since receiving McChrystal’s assessment back in late August, your casualty count is rapidly approaching half of the entire year’s total. Again, Mr. President, WHY?

I brought this up a month ago, asking the same question…and that was a month AFTER Obama had received MCrystal’s assessment. It’s been another month hence, and still no strategy. We’re hearing now that Obama may “lock in” his decision by next Monday, but we’ve been hearing that for weeks. What’s so special about next Monday, other than it’s the Senate’s first day back to begin debate on the healthcare debacle? And, what exactly does “lock” mean? We’ve already been given one strategy and now we’re about to get another. Does this President actually believe there is one and only one strategy and that no further adjustments will be necessary as conditions on the ground change? He’s just not that good at the war “thing” and neither are very many of his “war councilors” for that matter.

If the measure of “getting it right” is determined by how long it takes you to do it, could we PLEASE apply this principle to the REST of the Obama agenda? Maybe an extended “cooling off period” for healthcare, cap and trade, and the buyouts and sellouts of America’s private sector would be better served as well.

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The major decision the Obama Administration continues to procrastinate is whether to continue the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Victory in Afghanistan was, as you will recall, one of Obama’s main campaign themes - one he used to convince people that he wasn’t the dyed-in-the-tie-dyes peacenik his left-wing record, background and positions on other issues suggested. Under President Bush, America’s war aims in Afghanistan were fairly straightforward:

(1) Drive the Taliban from power.

(2) Destroy Al Qaeda’s training and operations bases in the country, while killing or capturing as many of their personnel as possible.

(3) Replace the Taliban with a government that was less repressive, viewed as legitimate by the Afghan people, and would not cooperate with Al Qaeda - a step that inherently involved preventing the revival of the Taliban itself, given its Islamist ideology and thorough integration with Al Qaeda.

Step One was accomplished swiftly in the fall of 2001, and Step Two proceeded apace at the same time; Al Qaeda’s leadership was never wholly destroyed (its very top men appear to have fled to the Waziristan region of Pakistan), nor completely routed from the country, but its bases were destroyed and its ability to project power from Afghanistan to outside countries was essentially crippled.

Step Three was always the diciest as a long-term proposition; as I wrote in early 2003:

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If you are old enough to remember the George W. Bush Administration and the 2004 and 2008 presidential campaigns, you will recall that a favorite theme of critics of Bush’s war management was that Bush hadn’t listened to Army brass asking for more troops in Iraq and/or Afghanistan. In particular, the Democrats practically made a secular saint of General Eric Shinseki, who supposedly was fired for delivering this message. (The truth is rather different, but the media has been printing the legend for so long it’s hardly worth the candle at this late date to argue the point). Gen. Shinseki even ended up being given a Cabinet post in the Obama Administration for little other reason than as a symbol that Obama would break from his predecessor by following his subordinates’ recommendations.

Well, as we so often have reason to say of Obama’s campaign rhetoric, that was then and this is now. And we are learning that listening to requests from his commanders for more troops is not Obama’s strong suit as Commander-in-Chief.

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From the diaries by Caleb

The President has a big problem. BIG problem. And, down deep in my soul I think this problem is going to make the current state of the economy look pretty good. Ten or fifteen percent unemployment will be no big deal.

As I noted in a diary yesterday, a US soldier has been taken prisoner in Afghanistan by the Taliban. It is confirmed that they have a video of him in captivity, and he’s likely not being held at the Kabul Sheraton Grand nor, I suspect, is he being fed a diet that is consistent with his culture and I doubt the video will show him being allow to participate in a chapel service with religious adviser of his particular faith.

You can bet the enemy will be releasing that video - the US Army already has it and has confirmed it’s accuracy without releasing the name of the soldier pending notification of next of kin. It’s also a good bet that there will be future videos and it’s a sure thing that those will be released as well.

President Obama hasn’t said anything so far, and he hasn’t been asked either. Recall that a simple hostage taking at sea sent him into four days of dithering when the problem could have been resolved well within the first day and was only resolved in the fourth day because the senior officer on-scene was willing to put his career on the line.

This time it’s different.

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Despite taking place in the Information Age, very few of the heroic exploits of American soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines since September 11, 2001, have made their way into the living rooms of ordinary Americans — at least in any lasting way.

Whether this is the result of changing values among the American people, the general population’s perpetually dwindling attention span, or because there are so many things closer to home our nation is choosing to focus on instead of our service men and women’s gallant deeds and efforts (whether that be a rocky national economy or the latest season of American Idol), the fact is this generation has failed to identify and treasure its incarnations of historic military heroes like Audie Murphy, Jimmy Doolittle, Pappy Boyington, Bill Pitsenbarger, Bud Day, and countless others.

This disappointing reality is not unique to the current decade. Who, for example, can name the most recent pre-global war on terror (GWOT) recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor? The names of Randy Shughart and Gary Gordon — two Army special operations sergeants who received the nation’s highest award for their heroic actions in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993 — are utterly foreign to the vast majority of the same American population that can name the latest movie star to file for divorce, the latest starlet to have borne a child out of wedlock, or the latest teen sensation to enter alcohol rehab.

Part of the problem is a lack of reporting on stories of true heroism among the men and women serving this country in war zones around the world. After all, how can people know of the deeds being done by our best and brightest if the news media — whose sole raison d’être is to report on deeds and events — doesn’t the job it exists to do?

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Two years ago this April 19th, Harry Reid declared the war in Iraq “lost.”

“Now I believe, myself, that the secretary of state, the secretary of defense and you have to make your own decision as to what the president knows: that this war is lost, that the surge is not accomplishing anything,” Reid, D-Nev., told reporters.

Reid was utterly wrong and has never retracted his remarks. In fact, his remarks were heralded by the Islamofascists we fight and were greeted negatively by the American soldiers and sailors who were and are winning on and off the battlefield in Iraq.

But we should remind Harry Reid of this anniversary. I would encourage each and everyone one of you to send Harry Reid an anniversary card, reminding him of the day, two years ago, he threw our military under the bus for political expedience.

His address is:

Lloyd D. George Building
333 Las Vegas Boulevard
South, Suite 8016
Las Vegas, NV 89101

Hat tip to Jed Babbin for reminding me and egging me on.

You wonder if Maureen Dowd reads her own paper when she writes things like this: “Mr. Obama called W. on Friday to give him a heads-up about the repudiation on Iraq. Robert Gibbs said the call was not at all contentious.” Should someone tell her it wasn’t contentious because it marked  the fulfillment not the repudiation of Bush’s Iraq policy? (Hence, the decision to leave the most troops possible in place through the next election and leave 50,000 there for a while thereafter.)

–Jennifer Rubin. It’s long been a mystery to me as to why Dowd’s trite, lame, desperate attempts at humor, coupled with her complete ignorance of basic facts, haven’t gotten her fired from the New York Times. I suppose it says something about the newspaper that they keep her there; either the Times feels pity for a columnist who likely won’t be able to write anywhere else, or they are blissfully unaware of the damage they are doing to their reputation by keeping Dowd around.

“Bush probably would have given a very similar speech.”

Do read the whole thing, of course, but that line was worth highlighting. As is the following:

At the risk of heading into la-la land, I think Obama should have tipped his hat ever so slightly today to President Bush, Sen. McCain, and other Republicans who had supported the surge strategy, naming them and thanking them. Of course, there’s no telling how Iraq would look today had the surge never happened, but it’s likely that conditions would be pretty grim and that this withdrawal plan would have the smell of defeat to it, rather than the opposite, as it does.

Obama could have caveated this to death — “I opposed Bush’s decision to begin this war, I opposed how he sold it to America, I opposed the way he prosecuted it,” etc. But he could have recognized that Bush’s decision to change strategies in 2007 is in large part why the security situation in Iraq has turned around more than anyone could have hoped, why we can now begin drawing down our forces with a good measure of confidence, and why our troops now feel more and more that their sacrifice is worth it.

Not only would this have been magnanimous, it would have been smart politics. It would have acknowledged the bipartisanship that underlies the decision to begin bringing our troops home by drawing an important line of continuity through our Iraq efforts of the past two years. It would have disarmed Obama’s more hawkish critics on Iraq by conceding their point on the surge and turning it into an argument for the drawdown, which it is. And it would have shown Republicans that Obama is committed not just to a bipartisanship of style but of substance — not just being willing to recognize when the other side has valid points, but actually incorporating them into one’s own thinking.

The President should have taken Brose’s advice. He would have found much to praise in the Bush Administration’s implementation of the surge and the counterinsurgency strategy. On this issue, see also my contribution to the Arena.

During his Presidential campaign, Barack Obama famously promised direct diplomacy with Iran, going as far as to say he will meet Iranian leaders without preconditions of any kind. Even as Iranian-funded and -armed forces in Iraq were bombing civilians and shooting at American troops, he promised to meet with their leaders. We’re not at war with Eurasia, and absolutely should not start one.

As he told NPR:

Oh, we have to deal with the role of Iran. The question is whether we deal with Iran through saber-rattling, or whether we deal with Iran by direct diplomatic engagement. The key for us is to engage in the sort of direct talks that we engaged in, by the way, when Iran cooperated with us in dealing with the Taliban in Afghanistan. It’s that sort of direct engagement that this president has been unwilling to do, but under an Obama administration would be, I think a top priority.

It’s all just words, of course, because the statements made by Secretary Clinton make it clear that Obama sees no chance of success for this plan against Iran’s nuclear program.

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This is a good inside look at the efforts that were made to bring about the surge of troops and the counterinsurgency effort that helped establish the relative peace that now reigns in Iraq–and has reigned for a while now.

We have yet to hear, of course, from President Obama and Vice President Biden, who both decried and denounced the surge during their respective Presidential campaigns and during the general election. How much more successful do the surge and the counterinsurgency strategy have to be before the President and Vice President finally admit error? And with the admission of error, shouldn’t the White House admit as well that any precipitous withdrawal from Iraq would only serve to put at risk all of the gains that have been made in securing and stabilizing the country?

It’s high time for some mea culpas. We had them concerning the Tom Daschle taxcapades. We ought to have them for a far more important issue the President and the Vice President got wrong.