Partisan Politicking Endangering Our Troops in Afghanistan

PrintEmail

Listening to talk radio this morning, I’m nearly convinced that our campaign in Afghanistan began falling apart just as soon as Barack Obama completed the oath to become President of the United States.
 
According to the foreign policy experts that grace my morning commute, what has been happening in Afghanistan for the last six years is of no consequence to what took place yesterday when 10 coalition forces, including eight Americans, lost their lives in an ambush against a pair of isolated outposts.
 
Though some of my countrymen and women would like to believe this tale, reality paints a far different picture. Afghanistan has been a neglected campaign for some time, thanks in large part to the messianic pursuit of a Mesopotamian mirage that consumed partisans on the right for much of the Bush administration. I can recall hearing time and time again that Iraq was the “central front in the war on terror.” Now right wing hawks have suddenly decided that Afghanistan ought to be our real focus again. It's leadership like this that makes me thank God these guys don’t call the shots anymore.
 
But members of the “right” are not the only ones at fault here.
 
Unfortunately incompetence is a communicable disease in Washington. Rather than having thought through exactly how we are to “fix” our Afghanistan policy, the Obama administration is only now beginning to take on this issue. Why, for example, it has taken the administration months to meet with the new commander of our forces in Afghanistan that they put in place is anyone’s guess.
 
Indeed to a great degree it is their misplaced priorities that are not helping matters on the ground in Afghanistan. Rather than coming prepared to meet the demands of the nation's Commander in Chief, the administration has wasted time, money and, frankly, lives while they focus almost all of their energy on a moribund economy that has nearly been smothered with Keynesian affection.
 
It's time for the adults on both sides to stop trying to score cheap political points, and to start figuring out just how to finish this war in a way that protects our interests. As I have advised, the first thing that needs to be done is to determine just what we mean by victory. And if victory is anything other than ensuring Afghanistan is not a threat to the United States, we will fail.
 
 
(Image by Spc. Daniel Love, U.S. Army, American and British soldiers take a tactical pause during a combat patrol in the Sangin District area of Helmand Province, April 10, 2007.)
 
Read more stories on the war in Afghanistan at YPNation.