Our Timeline, and the Taliban’s
IT is hard to be optimistic about the outcome of President Obama’s troop “surge” in Afghanistan.
The additional forces sound large in headlines, but shrink small in the mountains. The commitment is intended as an earnest indication of America’s will.
But neither the number of troops nor the timeline that mandates a drawdown in less than two years is likely to impress the Taliban, who think in decades, or for that matter the Afghan people.
Most decision-makers on both sides of the Atlantic now privately believe we are in the business of managing failure, and that is how the surge looks.
The president allowed himself to be convinced that a refusal to reinforce NATO’s mission in Afghanistan would fatally weaken the resolve of Pakistan in resisting Islamic militancy.
Meanwhile at home, refusal to meet the American generals’ demands threatened to brand him as the man who lost the Afghan war.
Thus the surge lies in the realm of politics, not warfare.
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