I know there’s always a temptation, and I’m sure I’ll get asked questions about recent individual events. But if you look back over the last two years, I’d say there’s been very little correlation between this or that -- this or that spectacular event, this or that assassination, this or that attack here or there. You need to look at the entire campaign; you need to look at the entire effort; and you need, most importantly, to look at the results. And so that is the focus of this report. The focus of the report is what’s happening over time.
So I’ll be happy to answer your questions on the report. But again, I really urge you to look at the progress over the last two years, the progress over the last six months. And as we look ahead, as you’ve heard from Secretary Gates, as you heard -- as you and the Congress heard from General Petraeus, we have made this progress. This progress is fragile. This progress is reversible. There’s still a lot, a lot to do.
There’s going to be some very tough days ahead, just as there have been tough days in the past. There’s going to be -- there’s going to be efforts to make spectacular attacks, and there’s going to be individual incidents. But I would really urge, as you look at that, as you look at any of these individual attacks, you know, good days, bad days -- horrible days sometimes, where we have losses -- as the secretary said, over a thousand, I think, fatalities on our side, each one of which -- and with our Afghan partners and our other colleagues, the casualties of any kind, military or civilian, are tragic and regrettable. But the sacrifices that all are making are paying off in this tangible progress that we’re making.
But I would like to address the false implication of the statement that we are making progress over the last two years which holds as conventional wisdom that before that escalation, Iraq distracted us from winning in Afghanistan. The problem with this notion is that the enemy surged in Afghanistan, and so before we counter-surged, the enemy made some gains during the gap. Before the enemy surged, we were doing fine in Afghanistan in preventing the enemy from rebuilding a sanctuary with our much lower troop commitment.
Even President Obama noted a year ago that our problems in Afghanistan didn't really start until 2008. I'd say that the problems started building as early as 2007, but 2008 is a reasonable point to identify as when the enemy started making solid gains that our old commitment level couldn't cope with:
I've judged that it was that year--or maybe sometime in 2007--that we could say that.
My timeline was based on the fact that we pretty much beat al Qaeda in Iraq in 2007 during the surge, and so al Qaeda switched emphasis to Afghanistan. Also, the Taliban in Pakistan managed to set up a good deal inside Pakistan by 2006, eventually complicating our efforts in Afghanistan.
Which means, of course, that Iraq did not "distract" us from winning in Afghanistan. We were doing fine in Afghanistan through 2008 according to the president, but possibly only sometime in 2007 if you ask me. At worst, you can argue that we were delayed in reinforcing Afghanistan by perhaps a year because of Iraq. But since it looked like a win was coming in Iraq by the end of 2007, we didn't take extraordinary measures to bolster Afghanistan before reductions in Iraq could ease that path. If the situation in Afghanistan was that bad, we could have done something sooner.
We haven't been losing in Afghanistan for a decade because of some Iraq distraction. And it isn't really fair to say that we were losing for a year before we started adding troops, when enemy gains were based on the enemy gaining assets from a new sanctuary in Pakistan and from al Qaeda giving up on Iraq where we won a more important campaign and shifting their own resources back to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
I know it is natural for the anti-war people to panic and counsel our defeat in the only war they have to protest, but don't believe them. Have patience. We can knock down our enemies in Afghanistan and again get to the point where not many Americans are needed to bolster Afghanistan defenses against jihadi efforts to win. Whatever else you may think of President Obama's policies, be supportive of his decision to fight and win in Afghanistan.
