Defense Secretary Robert Gates says it’s a mistake to set a deadline to end American military action, as some liberals have sought, and that a defeat would be disastrous for the U.S.
In a stern warning to critics of a continued troop presence in Afghanistan, Gates said the Islamic extremist Taliban and Al Qaeda would perceive an early pullout as a victory over the United States as similar to the Soviet Union’s humiliating withdrawal in 1989 after a 10-year war.
“The notion of timelines and exit strategies and so on, frankly, I think would all be a strategic mistake. The reality is, failure in Afghanistan would be a huge setback for the United States,” Gates said in an interview broadcast Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Hey, how ’bout that? Just like Iraq, huh?
Our problem is that the liberal meme about Afghanistan (ie, “Iraq bad, Afghanistan good”) was just a talking point. A convenient means of hammering President Bush and attacking John McCain in 2008 – none of them, from Obama on down, probably believed their own words. Perhaps they just hoped that Afghanistan would prove easy…it seemed to be as much, even going in to late 2008. But, as it turns out, the campaign in Afghanistan changed as the enemy grew bolder and now we’ve got a long, hard fight ahead of us.
Liberals don’t want to fight it.
I think what our liberals would prefer is some way to scuttle Afghanistan in time for it to be forgotten by 2012…much as Clinton’s pulling the plug early on Somalia made it a non-issue by 1996. Afghanistan is a much more difficult and much more dangerous campaign – in fact and in effect around the world – than Somalia ever was, but our liberals are always willing to look in to ways and means of surrendering, especially if they can then ignore the issue on the campaign trail. The trouble is, scuttling Afghanistan won’t be something like Somalia – that surrender did, of course, encourage bin Laden and led by stages to 9/11, but the most important thing (to liberals) is that it didn’t cause them to lose in 1996. To quit on Afghanistan means certain Taliban/al Qaeda victory in that nation, and perhaps in Pakistan, as well…and this in addition to the massive encouragement it would give for jihadists to attack us here, at home.
The hard task for us conservatives, then, is to some how stiffen Obama’s spine – to work diligently for American victory, even though this would work to Obama’s credit, in the long run. Now, if it becomes completely clear that we can’t push Obama to fight for victory, then we will have to re-think what is best for our troops and our nation…it’ll be a choice between continuing a bloodletting in the hopes that in 2013 we can get new, victorious policies in place, or agreeing to a withdrawal. Neither of those outcomes is good for America – we’ll be deciding which is least-worst. Better, then, to work to keep Obama up on the rails vis a vis the War on Terrorism and the Afghan Campaign.
A difficult task, but we must do it.
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