Hammer Wants An Anvil
Paks, unintimidated by the past week’s attacks, have launched their assault on South Waziristan. NYT.
Meanwhile, still waiting to see whether Obama plans to wack the mole on his side of the board. The administration has denied a BBC report that Obama has told the Brits and the Afghans that he is planning to announce this week that he will meet the full McChrystal recommendation of 40,000-plus troops.
Mr Gibbs said the president had “not made a decision”.
He added: “I think that you can assume that the BBC will not be the first outlet for such a decision.”
However he did say the US had been “coordinating our review with our allies” and that Mr Brown had “communicated to us their decision to send more troops” in a phone call last week.
“Obviously, the British people and those that serve there have borne an enormous price in casualties. Obviously, we’re thankful for a strengthening of the coalition,” Mr Gibbs said.
There when you need ‘em. Box up another set of classic DVDs. Welcome news all around, denials not withstanding. Maybe Obama saw this Newsweek cover:
Fawning “Inconvenient Truth Teller” article inside paints him as a sort of goof savant … a bit like Chauncey Gardiner of “Being There,” he’s been in Washington DC his entire life, everyone likes him, and suddenly they think he’s a genius. The three-decade gaffe-and-reverse record requires some acrobatics, though. The Newsweek scribblers clearly like his go-lite, wack-a-mole strategy though they are big enough to admit at the end that people who actually know what they are talking about say it won’t work. It’s not exactly the Joe Biden embed that I wished out loud NYT’s Dexter Filkins would do as a counterbalance to his McChyrstal piece earlier this week,* but close.
Joe Biden had a question. During a long Sunday meeting with President Obama and top national-security advisers on Sept. 13, the VP interjected, “Can I just clarify a factual point? How much will we spend this year on Afghanistan?” Someone provided the figure: $65 billion. “And how much will we spend on Pakistan?” Another figure was supplied: $2.25 billion. “Well, by my calculations that’s a 30-to-1 ratio in favor of Afghanistan. So I have a question. Al Qaeda is almost all in Pakistan, and Pakistan has nuclear weapons. And yet for every dollar we’re spending in Pakistan, we’re spending $30 in Afghanistan. Does that make strategic sense?” The White House Situation Room fell silent. But the questions had their desired effect: those gathered began putting more thought into Pakistan as the key theater in the region.
…
In the early days of the administration, Biden was a bit of a joke in some quarters of the White House. He was never the buffoonish character portrayed by late-night comics, but his off-message blurts were the source of eye-rolling and some irritation among the president’s men and women. None of the gaffes was particularly damaging, but aides who’d been with Obama through the campaign knew that the president valued very tight control. Biden himself seemed wounded by the sniggering. Asked about his gaffes by a NEWSWEEK reporter last spring, he responded a little defensively, “A gaffe in Washington is someone telling the truth, and telling the truth has never hurt me.”
…
That fall he told The New Yorker that his model was Lyndon Johnson, who wanted to help the young John F. Kennedy navigate the shoals of Congress. It was an odd choice: LBJ was miserable, mocked by the Kennedys as “Uncle Cornpone,” and Biden risked repeating his fate with the ambitious, smart guys around Obama. More wisely, Biden consulted Walter Mondale, the former senator who became Jimmy Carter’s veep and was the first to insist on an office inside the White House, near the Oval Office. Mondale advised Biden to stake out his claim, to decide what he really wanted.
The answer was access. Biden did not want an agenda or an assigned policy task or a big staff. But he did want to be in the room when the decisions were made. Obama agreed and told him he wanted Biden’s “unvarnished opinion.” Recounting this moment to a NEWSWEEK reporter, Biden opened his arms wide and mock-bellowed, “You’ve got it!”
At first Obama may have felt that he’d gotten more than he bargained for. The two men are Mutt and Jeff, warm and a little verbose versus precise and a little too cool. After serving as a committee chairman, wielding his own gavel, Biden had trouble adjusting to the bureaucratic strictures of the vice presidency. “This is the first time I’ve had a boss in 37 years,” he told NEWSWEEK in May. To his staff, he would sometimes confess that he had talked too long or said the wrong thing at a meeting with the president—that he had to sharpen his approach.
Less than a month into the Obama presidency, Biden forthrightly, if unwisely, declared that the new administration’s economic plan had a “30 percent chance” of failure.
And probably the most telling bit:
The president relies on Biden’s judgment, but he may be more interested in having his veep play the devil’s advocate. One senses, from both his track record and his recent remarks, that Obama is comfortable with having Biden push from one side and General McChrystal push from the other.
Last week the president told congressional leaders that he did not plan on drawing down troops in Afghanistan, but by the same token he was rethinking the full-scale counterinsurgency strategy proposed by McChrystal. Obama has shown a penchant for splitting the difference, for finding the middle way on tough policy issues.
Some administration officials, led by Biden, appear to hope that American forces can rely more on counterterrorism operations—attacks by Predator drones and small elite units on terrorist hiding places—to hold Afghanistan together and defeat Al Qaeda. But critics call this “splitting the baby” and say it’ll never work. As a senior civilian Pentagon official points out, “No one has more experience with counterterrorism than McChrystal,” who ran black ops in Iraq and Afghanistan for five years. “If there was an easier, better way, he’d be pushing for it,” says this official, who would not be quoted discussing internal deliberations.
Whatever Obama thinks about Afghan strategy, I don’t think he’s going with anything now popularly known as ”The Biden Plan.” News that he might actually be supporting his generals’ very considered proposal is encouraging, and hopefully he won’t, in some kind of clumsy political sop, do what I’d call “splitting the baby,” which isn’t Biden’s plan but bringing the knife down somewhere between McChrystal and Biden. Meanwhile, the Newsweek article is actually pretty informative, given that Biden is in fact “in the room,” though its effort to dress him up can’t quite get around the fact that his business attire includes a big purple and yellow polka-dotted bowtie that squirts water. Points for noting the big shoes, orange wig, big red “honk” nose, even if Newsweek has decided the clown act is more of a sage jester just telling it like it is.
* The definitive day-in-the-life Biden embed is really a job for PJ O’Rourke. Who knows, it could come to pass, if the Obamists decide they need to sideline the goof savant, they’d even allow that.
Topics: Afghanistan, Obama, Pakistan
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:06 am on Saturday, October 17, 2009
5 Responses to “Hammer Wants An Anvil”
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October 17th, 2009 at 11:41 am
Could go with the Murtha Plan and just park Okinawa off the Afghan coast. That’d give us a real nice base to operate from.
O/T:
There’s word starting to go around about unnamed “western officials” leaking that some of the coalition members have been bribing the murder/death cultists in their areas of responsibility in Afghanistan to go light and easy on their forces.
You have access to anyone who might have the straight poop on that? There’s always the possibility that it’s a cooked up story designed to fire up some strife within, but…
Looking back at how some of our “allies” went to such great lengths in the early years of the Afghan war to make sure they did nothing what so ever to be of any use to anyone on anything at any time…. it would fit that pattern.
October 17th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
I guess that’s the other end of the baby Biden wants to split, now that you mention it. The weird end of the baby that has an ostrich head.
Re that other thing, seen the report and th denial that the Italians were doing it. Given their willingness to negotiate, it wouldn’t surprise me. Just surprised that the French apparently hadn’t thought of it and got burned.
October 17th, 2009 at 10:57 pm
From what I’ve been reading, the program of paying for protection also included the French, the Germans, and others. The French got bit by it primarily because no one wanted to admit to it, so it was never talked about so no one coordinated within it.
Let us all, please, remember, that most of those who are our “allies” in this war, have, for the last generation plus, had no military experience outside of UN Peace Keeping.
You gotta dig pretty deep to find anything more dysfunctional, useless, corrupt and enemy aiding in the latter half of the 20th century and all of this current century to date, than the UN Peace Keeping “efforts”.
October 18th, 2009 at 7:16 pm
Biden: “This is the first time I’ve had a boss in 37 years.”
o Unaccountable and loving it!
– How proud the voters of Delaware must be.
– I guess only pols were concerned Delaware Gov. Ruth Ann Minner (D) filled Biden’s Senate seat with his longtime aide, Ted Kaufman, who admits to being a placeholder until 2010.
– How far does the apple fall from the tree as Biden’s son, Beau, says he will run for his father’s Senate seat?
October 19th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
Who can blame Beau, though? 37 years without a boss is an enviable position to be in. Though, I’d rather be my own boss than live life in the Senate. FeFe, that was the quote that jumped out at me too. At least Biden is expressing himself in basically honest fashion.