The hawks have been trying to drive for the SURGE!!! Part Deux since Obama took over in January. Now they feel they have him painted into a corner. But it's clear that the White House sees this and may be resisting, which is far more than I gave them credit for this morning.The sun rose today and its gravitational force kept the planet twisting around it through the void, so naturally Fred and Kim Kagan, the neoconservative wing of counterinsurgency, have put out a call for between 40,000 and 45,000 additional troops to be sent to Afghanistan in the next year. Both Kagans advised the McChrystal strategy review that leaked yesterday to box President Obama into escalation. But they say — really, really prominently — that they’re not speaking for Gen. Stanley McChrystal or anyone else. Maybe so, but now we have a good idea of who on the review advocated for 40,000 troops, something that fellow adviser Anthony Cordesman recently reported.
It’s difficult to understand how the Kagans think there are 40,000 – 45,000 U.S. troops available for deployment — the Pentagon doesn’t think the Army can deploy a single additional combat brigade to Afghanistan in the next six months — and the report is silent on whether to increase the pace of withdrawal from Iraq (formerly a Kagan no-no); whether to decrease the time in between deployments, which the Army and the Secretary of Defense will resist after having to do it to sustain the 2007 Iraq troop surge; or whether to … I don’t know. They just want the politically treacherous 40,000-45,000 troop increase, and now the GOP will have a troop figure to say Afghanistan requires if Obama doesn’t provide such a ginormous increase. (They also back the consensus call for speeding up the development and deployment of Afghan security forces.)
The Obama administration is not reacting kindly to the leak’s attempted trap. “The impact may be the opposite of the leakers’ intent,” said an official in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. “This will increase the determination of the civilian leadership not to be rushed or pressured.”
But in the end I still believe that Obama will fold. McChrystal will get his 40K troops.
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3 comments:
More troops? Maybe. But the full 40k? I think the article you linked to makes it clear that that is near impossible.
Slow down your gut instinct towards believing that a Democrat will fold, Obama has shown that he has more steel in him than most of his brethren (or else I wouldn't have crossed the aisle to vote for him). He lives in the world of the practical (though he might see it through rose colored glasses), not in the neoconservative land of "make decisions first and then find out whether reality supports your presumptions" (see Iraq).
I'm hoping you're right, Paul. We don't have the troops anyway. Hell, we don't even have a combat brigade at this point.
I wondered how long it took before you people stopped pretending you supported the war in Afghanistan.
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