I Don’t Care About an Afghanistan Troop "Surge"…
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It’s worse than useless unless accompanied by a change in strategy from the Vietnam-era search and destroy, which seems to be our unstated current strategy — or its close cousin, Slow Joe Biden’s “counterterrorism” strategy — to the one that Gen. Stanley McChrystal insists is the only strategy that can actually succeed: counterinsurgency (COIN).
Alas, I cannot tell from the news coverage whether the decision of Barack H. Obama is likely to include a COIN strategy; it’s all vagueness, handwaving, and fog, like “a comprehensive strategy” and “an effort muscular enough to ‘dismantle and degrade’ the enemy and ensure that ‘Al Qaeda and its extremist allies cannot operate’ in the region“… meaningless phrases that every Commander in Chief says about every campaign strategy in every war.
As usual, the left-stream media focuses only on the number of troops — and on how angry it will make liberals to add any new forces at all. For the One They Thought They Were Waiting For promised them a major American defeat, which they could blame on President Bush. He swore!
So evidently Obama is as sanguine about lying to the Left as he is about lying to the rest of America. I’m sure this will do wonders for his mob approval.
(Actually, that was a typo for job approval… but upon due consideration, I decided to keep it!)
In fact, the Times article devotes far more column inches to speculating how the One will choose to announce his decision than to, you know, exactly how we plan to win: Will it be a short address from the Oval Office, or a long, soporific speech in another venue? (I predict the latter; the voice of the TOTUS will be heard in our land.)
But the only strategic mention of any kind that I can find is what all news accounts agree upon: Barack Obama plans to focus very strongly on an exit strategy.
