Advanced Baby Splittage
President Barack Obama, half-pregnant with Bush’s Afghan war, apparently is leaning toward splitting the baby … surgically. Washington Post:
President Obama has asked the Pentagon’s top generals to provide him with more options for troop levels in Afghanistan, two U.S. officials said late Friday, with one adding that some of the alternatives would allow Obama to send fewer new troops than the roughly 40,000 requested by his top commander.
Obama met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the White House on Friday, holding a 90-minute discussion that centered on the strain on the force after eight years of war in two countries. The meeting — the first of its kind with the chiefs of the Navy, Army, Marine Corps and Air Force, who were not part of the president’s war council meetings on Afghanistan in recent weeks — prompted Obama to request another such meeting before he announces a decision on sending additional troops, the officials said.
The military chiefs have been largely supportive of a resource request by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, that would by one Pentagon estimate require the deployment of 44,000 additional troops. But opinion among members of Obama’s national security team is divided, and he now appears to be seeking a compromise solution that would satisfy both his military and civilian advisers.
How about one that involves winning? I was under the impression that Gen. Stanley McChrystal had given the president several troop level options, between 10,000 and 40,000, but apparently he needs options on his options.
Maybe more important than an Oval Office signoff on every last bullet, bean and soldier, is the basic objective, and apparently the president’s no closer there, either:
Before he can determine troop levels, his advisers have said, he must decide whether to embrace a strategy focused heavily on counterinsurgency, which would require additional forces to protect population centers, or one that makes counterterrorism the main focus of U.S. efforts in the country, which would rely on relatively fewer American troops.
…
The timing of Obama’s decision on Afghanistan remains up in the air. But his request for another meeting with the military chiefs — and the expectation that he will meet again with his top national security advisers before reaching a conclusion — may leave him too little time to decide the issue before he travels to Asia on Nov. 11.
I’m afraid that’s just not enough time for him to recognize that he is the President of the United States, that the buck stops with him, that he’ll never make everyone happy, that his current direction is more likely to make no one happy, that extended indecisiveness is its own kind of decision and, in time of war, fundamentally, it gives him enough time to grow a set.
Also that, no matter how he painstakingly he splits it, it’s his baby now.
Topics: Afghanistan, Obama, military
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:00 am on Saturday, October 31, 2009
2 Responses to “Advanced Baby Splittage”
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October 31st, 2009 at 10:53 am
American Power tracked-back with, ‘Obama Salutes the Troops’.
November 1st, 2009 at 12:17 pm
[...] that, since the media isn’t obsessing over every fallen soldier that returns home anymore. It doesn’t have to be this way; Bush left Obama plenty of notes on how to deal with Afghanistan, but that’s not a priority [...]