We finished the initial missions in the south, held them without losing ground over the last year; and I thought this spring we'd be shifting the focus to the east.
Apparently not:
Though the official line is that the U.S. withdrawal timetable is unchanged, some U.S. officials have begun to talk about speeding it up—in part because there are also positive developments that might make a faster pullout more feasible. ...
Some Obama administration officials are also convinced that the Obama “surge” of 30,000 additional troops, scheduled to be wound down by September, has left just enough stability on the ground, or what Petraeus has called "Afghan good enough" in the crucial part of the country called “regional command east.” As National Journal senior correspondent James Kitfield wrote in a perceptive assessment from Afghanistan in December: “Although they remain dependent on coalition ‘enablers’ such as airpower and logistics, Afghan security forces have increasingly shouldered the burden in RC East and kept the insurgents on the defensive.”
We haven't yet made our main effort in the east, but we have decided we've already done enough? Why? This is disturbing. Even before the latest shooting incident it looked suspiciously like President Obama was ready to pull the plug on the war before the pivot east. Is it really good enough now to declare victory without another fighting season of going after the enemy? Are Afghan forces really good enough already?
Or are we looking for excuses to run away? And pretend we aren't running? Well, to at least obscure that fact until after November?
Just what the Hell is going on?
UPDATE: We shouldn't be at this point where public support for the "real" and "good" war is fragile enough to be shattered by the actions of one soldier. I once hoped that President Obama could use his purported silver tongue to support the war in Afghanistan. I complained during Iraq that President Bush only hauled out a good speech about Iraq when polling got particularly bad and wished he would have done that routinely.
Now I pine for what Bush did on this issue. Obama hasn't even bothered to give speeches on Afghanistan and why it is important to win.
But if the only reason Obama talked about Afghanistan was to hammer Bush and if the only objective he has is to avoid losing the war before the November election, all is clear.
And as for the president's supporters who bitterly said Iraq "distracted" us from winning in Afghanistan? A pox on them for failing to support the war in Afghanistan. I knew they could never support the only war we have. Politics may mute their opposition to keep their man in office, but never believe them when they say they are only opposed to the current war because their nuanced, big brains understand the real threat we have to man up and face. Feh.
UPDATE: It really does look like we've pulled back from combat in Afghanistan. How else to explain the dramatic drop in casualties in February and March this year? We went from 26 in January 2012 (compared to 24 in January 2011 and 30 in January 2010) to 10 in February (compared to 18 in February 2011 and 31 in February 2010) and 4 so far in a March nearly halfway done (compared to 29 in March 2011 and 24 in March 2012).
This is just not consistent with going after the enemy in Afghanistan with an offensive in Regional Command East. Even if we've only pulled back during the aftermath of the Koran incident and the massacre incident, that wouldn't have shown a dramatic drop off back in February. Maybe we've just been lucky--despite the press coverage that we are in free-fall disaster--and our luck will even out as we stay on the offensive. Perhaps I'm just not reading the right reports or misinterpreting what is happening. Maybe there really is a lull because we need to reposition forces for the RCE offensive this year and the ongoing withdrawal of the fall 2009 surge increment is complicating our efforts. I may need to watch the trends longer into the spring.
But it sure feels like we've decided to avoid casualties in an election year, hunker down, and get out as fast as we can. I hope I'm wrong.
Or can any war become a "war of choice" when it is too inconvenient for our left wing?
