Selling Exit Passes

This morning, BooMan argues that Obama will not got for any sort of Afghanistan surge as in Iraq, and in fact is now engaged in trying to sell a withdrawal (emphasis mine):

It appears that the administration is mainly working with the Washington Post in their effort to prep the country for a scale-down of our effort in Afghanistan. That is not to say that the Post is supportive of a scale-down. If anything, the case is the opposite. But, tonight, the Post has another article by Bob Woodward based on an interview with National Security Adviser Gen. James Jones. They have a front-page article on the source of Taliban funding (something I've been wondering about for years) by Craig Whitlock. They have an editorial advising us to go all-in or all-out by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. And they have a piece by Walter Pincus on the Taliban's successful communications strategy.

Whatever the specific intent of any of these articles, the cumulative effect is to convey a sense of an overwhelmingly daunting and hopeless challenge. And, I believe, that is what Obama wants to convey because his objective now is to gently announce that we are abandoning our nation-building effort in Afghanistan and that we will not be giving General McChrystal another 40,000 troops for a massive counterinsurgency program. This will contradict his campaign rhetoric and even some of his moves from the winter and spring. But talking tough on Afghanistan was always partly a way of compensating for being critical of military efforts in Iraq. He didn't want to look unwilling to fight against terrorists anywhere in the world. But that doesn't mean that he bought into the absurd 'war-on-terrorism' rhetoric of the Bush administration. With the failed elections in Afghanistan removing any semblance of legitimacy for Karzai's government, there is no reason to invest more in his success. That's the exact same mistake we made in Vietnam, and it cost us dearly in every way that counts.

I'm not sure about that. I'm not sure about that at all, especially since on a number of other parts of Bush's Warren Terrah rhetoric, Obama has bought into them completely, namely Bush's wiretapping of Americans and our treatment and continued incarceration of terror suspects without trial. Both of these programs are still going.

Having said that, Obama gets credit for turning over the torture probe to Eric Holder and Congress, and he has made improvements to the rendition and wiretapping system, but he's still fighting for a PATRIOT act renewal that is 99% the same as before.

There are many, many arguments as to why we're going to have to leave Afghanistan and soon, whether we want to or not. Chief among them is our broken economy. Right now, Obama has to be aware that a trillion dollar surge effort will end his domestic agenda altogether, and we just don't have the troop strength. But Obama's actions in the first several months of his term do not give me hope.

I pray BooMan is right and Obama has weighed the options and found staying untenable, as many Americans have. If there's anything in his favor right no for this tough decision, it's that the GOP has proven they will oppose anything Obama does simply for the reason that Obama is doing it, and the American people are sick of them.