COMMENTARY | By authority of President George W. Bush and the approval of Congress, the war in Afghanistan began Oct. 7, 2001. Almost 10 years later, President Barack Obama addressed the nation from the East Room of the White House to announce his plans to begin withdrawing U.S. troops. What confounds me is the timing, the approach and his inability to accept responsibility for ignoring the advice of his commanders and his failures in handling the war as commander-in-chief.
To begin, the president said that only 10,000 troops would be withdrawn by the end of this year. This token measure is clearly being made to appease his anti-war base and allow him to say he kept the withdrawal deadline he set back in December 2009. The other 23,000 have been curiously timed to leave Afghanistan just two months before the 2012 elections.
Obama also took the opportunity to get in another plug for the assassination of Osama bin Laden, even though the Al-Qaeda leader had not been in Afghanistan for years.
Most notably missing from his speech was any mention of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and General Petraeus - his military commanders in Afghanistan - and their opinions of the decision to withdraw. Both Gates and Petraeus have repeatedly argued that, while progress has been made, it is "fragile and reversible" and it is their opinion that precipitous drawdown would endanger what has been accomplished. In the words of Gates, "Far too much has been accomplished, at far too great a cost, to let the momentum slip away just as the enemy is on its back foot."
In his speech, Obama reminded us he "also made it clear our mission would not be open ended" and that he "would begin to draw-down our forces this July." It is also worth mentioning he told us the non-war in Libya, which is not allowed to be defined as "hostilities" in order to absolve him from the responsibility of not receiving congressional approval and freeing him from the restrictions of the War Powers Resolution, would last "days not weeks." According to Gallup, Obama's non-war in Libya has the lowest approval of any war polled in 40 years, reports CNS News.
Although Obama once said "victory" wasn't necessarily an objective, according to Fox News, he assured us that the military campaign in Afghanistan -- which he once called the "good" and "just" war -- was "meeting our goals" and that the drawdown would begin "from a position of strength."
"We have learned anew the profound cost of war," the president said, "a cost that has been paid by the nearly 4,500 Americans who have given their lives in Iraq, and the over 1,500 who have done so in Afghanistan."
What he didn't mention was that 933 of those deaths in Afghanistan occurred during his reign as commander-in-chief, surpassing the number of troop deaths during the entire eight-year tenure of Bush. Obama also failed to acknowledge that June was the deadliest month for civilians under his reign, according to BBC News.
What is most ironic is that neither Gates nor Petraeus will be in their current positions as Obama's decisions for Afghanistan are being implemented. Leon Panetta, the current director of Central Intelligence, will be replacing Gates as secretary of Defense. Petraeus has willingly accepted reassignment to replace Panetta. Coincidentally, Gates is scheduled to retire June 30.
The timing of the shuffling of the Afghanistan military command deck will curiously allow the biggest withdrawal objectors to jump the proverbial ship before the torpedoes set off by Obama's decisions can inevitably strike the hull.
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