Well our prez made his much anticipated Afghan speech….the Right hated it…..the Left hated it…and the pundits analyze the crap out of it….all night and all day……
My take was that it was the worse speech this Prez has given….to me it was a political speech aimed at calming the independents that everyone says will control the next election…….there is token troop withdrawal and still NO ideas on what to do with the country….he patted himself on the back for Osama…..and went on and on about the closeness of the Karzai people and the way forward in Afghanistan…..it was fully of vague generalizations…..all in all …..a crappy speech……
In an analysis by Billy Van Auken……
In concrete terms, Obama’s withdrawal proposal was crafted to give the US military command nearly everything it wanted, while helping him to get through his next election in 2012.
It calls for a token force of 10,000 to be withdrawn by the end of 2011. The July deadline set by Obama in December 2009, when he unveiled his proposed “surge” that sent another 33,000 troops into Afghanistan, will apparently come and go with no change on the ground in the occupied country. The generals will be allowed to decide what troops will be withdrawn and when over the next six months.
At the time that Obama announced the surge, the American public was told that it was a temporary measure that would “allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011.”
In reality, if the so-called “withdrawal” plan is completed, it will pull out only the 33,000 troops that he ordered into Afghanistan 18 months ago. The second round of troop withdrawals is set to take place on the eve of the 2012 presidential election. Still, by the end of 2012, twice as many US troops will remain in the country as were deployed there when Obama first took office at the beginning of 2009.
Obama is doing what all politicians do…….kick the can down the road (there is that tired old cliche again)…..if the Afghan army is not ready after 10 years….then when? Most likely NEVER! Afghanistan has never had a central government and to think that the US and NATO can change that is just wishful thinking…..in the mean time death and destruction will continue and eventually we will leave and Afghanistan will revert back to the 14th century where it has been since the 14th century…..
Interesting that this is not really how the UK news media sees it, though the numbers are pretty similar – incidentally, we knew all that BEFORE the speech (if I’ve got my time differences correct, which I probably have not).
However, if the aim is for the Karzai forces to take over the job that the UK and US are doing, then I would think it’s gonna get bloody cold in hell at about the same time as that happens. Frankly, it will never happen (as you say) and I’ve never thought it would, just as I can’t see the country becoming what the West would refer to as a democracy within the lifetime of anyone alive today.
I’m not sure that any of that matters so very much. What we wanted and COULD perhaps have largely achieved was the breaking and large-scale destruction of AQ and their Taliban supporters, but it would have required a MUCH greater input of manpower, equipment and money at the beginning – if THAT had been done, we might be long gone from there by now. Afghanistan would still be a despotic little semi-feudal state, but who cares? It would have been a much reduced threat to the West and THAT is what the people of the US and the UK wanted and largely supported.
Where did all this democratisation, humanitarian, holier than thou shit come from?
Part of the political game….trying to appease both sides before an election….sickening, huh?