Is this guy serious?
If a draft agreement between the Obama administration and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan is finalized, U.S. troops will remain in that country indefinitely — instead of being withdrawn at the end of 2014, as the administration has said.
This is a confession of failure. America’s longest war is nowhere near its end.
Yeah, American troops in South Korea more than 50 years after the end of the Korean War is a sign of failure. American troops still in Japan, Germany, and Italy nearly 70 years after World War II is a sign of failure.
Come on, people! The idea all along has been that the American combat role would decline to virtually nothing after 2014. But we would still be needed for a lot of support tasks, for training, and to preserve the possibility of direct action against terrorists who can't be reached by Afghan forces.
This is what we were supposed to do in Iraq, too, recall. Without our presence, jihadis have regrouped and even expanded their jihad to Syria.
So I am relieved that President Obama apparently intends to learn a lesson from his failure to stay in Iraq after 2011 and not get out of Afghanistan, just as we turned away after driving the Soviets from Afghanistan by the end stage of the Cold War.
How'd that work out? With a Taliban regime that hosted Osama bin Laden who murdered nearly 3,000 of us one clear morning on September 11, 2001.
Keeping a relatively small number of troops in Afghanistan--who will mostly be non-combat troops--is no confession of failure. This is an admission that we need to stay engaged to defend what we won--as we did with South Korea, Japan, Germany, and Italy.
It is a recognition that simply relying on drone strikes without the ability to act on the ground (in large part to keep intelligence flowing that allows for accurate and timely strikes) is no way to kill terrorists before they can kill us at home.
This is a confession of reality, people. Get a grip. I'm freaking delighted that President Obama is willing to defend what our troops died and bled to achieve.
