Interesting, to say the least:
White House military and defense advisers will meet again this and next week to discuss a proposed troop increase for Afghanistan, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said Sunday…
…”We would love the luxury of this debate to be reduced down to just one question — additional troops, 40,000,” Emanuel told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “This is a much more complex decision.”
“The question, though… does not come [down to] how many troops you send, but do you have a credible Afghan partner for this process that can provide the security and the type of services that the Afghan people need?” the chief of staff added. (emphasis added)
The issue here being the very credible stories of voter fraud in the recent Afghan Presidential election. What Emanuel is saying – or, at least, what he’s running up the flag pole – is the concept that while Obama would like very much to provide the requested military reinforcements, since there is questions about the government’s legitimacy, we simply can’t do it though we’ll continue to work with Afghan leaders to bring about a peaceful resolution and let no one think this means we’re giving up on al Qaeda as the full power of American law enforcement will be mobilized to bring them to justice, if we can get an indictment… Its a soft scuttle – a pretense that our hands are tied and we’re doing as much as we can, and its too bad that the Taliban are back in Kabul. If this goes through, I’ll expect that the CIA will suddenly decide that bin Laden died in the Tora Bora in 2001, thus getting Obama off the hook for that, too.
This sort of cowardly dodge is being seconded – most notably by Sen. John “I was in Cambodia” Kerry. Make no mistake about it, the Powers That Be in the Democrat leadership are looking for a way out of Afghanistan which doesn’t too badly damage their national security credentials. They might not be able to finesse this and end up forced to send the troops, but the preferred option does seem to be to get out – and get out far enough in advance of the 2012 elections that, hopefully, the American people will not care about it when voting time arrives.
The truth of the matter is that the Afghan government is horribly flawed – but we’re not there for the Afghan government, but for the people of Afghanistan, and the people of the world. Certainly, we must help the Afghan government overcome corruption and build a credible military force, but our moral responsibility is to the safety and liberty of the Afghan people, not to whomever happens to be running the show in Kabul. If we fail in this – if we use the excuse of government corruption to justify abandonment of the Afghan people – then we will have placed a mark of shame on our nation second only to that we acquired when we abandoned South Vietnam.
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