blasting his announcement of more troop deployments to Afghanistan.
Citing an end to the war in the region as imperative for ‘the common security
of the world,’ on Tuesday, December 1, the president announced the
planned deployment of 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan in
the hopes of bringing the seemingly endless war there to a conclusion.
Gen. Stanley
McChrystal, Obama’s commander in Afghanistan,
issued a dire assessment in August regarding the situation in that country and disclosed that the U.S.
was losing ground. McChrystal said: “Failure to gain the
initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term —
while Afghan security capacity matures — risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency
is no longer possible.” McChrystal will testify before Congress about the war early next week .
The aftermath of that decision has yielded the expected
backlash from both Obama supporters and detractors; some of it the typical
bipartisan buck-passing, and some of it a genuine sense of hurt and dismay that the president hasn’t been able to ‘end’ the war in Afghanistan
and bring more troops home. The disappointment is understandable, the Afghan
conflict has stretched out for the better part of a decade and the initial hope that many felt when Obama was elected, was that he would ‘end the war.’ But
wars don’t end just because people — even presidents — want them to. There has to
be a calculated strategy and just simply bringing the troops home isn’t a
realistic objective. We have to understand that war cannot be won by retreat.
“I do not make this decision lightly,” Obama told cadets
at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. “I make this
decision because I am convinced that our security is at stake in Afghanistan
and Pakistan.
This is the epicenter of the violent extremism practiced by al-Qaeda. It is
from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks
are being plotted as I speak.”
The war in Iraq
should have never happened, but the Afghan war was largely unavoidable after Sept. 11. We must be willing to
seek out al-Qaeda and remove them.
We cannot expect peace to happen just because we want it to. But asking our leader
to work miracles in 12 months time is unrealistic. –todd williams
