Obama Massively Failing In Afghanistan

This is nothing more than an effort to hold Obama accountable to the very same standards he used to demonize George Bush in Iraq:

Afghanistan violence is soaring, U.N. says
Afghanistan is increasingly dangerous for troops and civilians alike, a report says, citing an ‘alarming’ 94% increase in bomb attacks in the first four months of 2010, compared with last year.

By Laura King, Los Angeles Times
June 20, 2010
Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan

Afghanistan has become a far more dangerous place for Western troops and Afghan civilians alike, with an increase in suicide attacks, roadside bombings and political assassinations in the first four months of 2010, the United Nations said in a report released Saturday.

The gloomy assessment comes on the heels of congressional testimony last week by senior U.S. military officials who acknowledged that efforts to stabilize Afghanistan’s volatile south are proving more complex and time-consuming than anticipated.

With the U.S. troop numbers in the country approaching the 100,000 mark, the Western military toll has been rising sharply as the summer “fighting season” unfolds. More than 1,000 U.S. service members have died in the nearly 9-year-old conflict.

“There has been a great deal of ‘kinetic activity'” as Western and Afghan forces confront insurgents in the south, German army Brig. Gen. Josef Blotz, a spokesman for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s International Security Assistance Force, told reporters Saturday in Kabul, the capital. That is the term the military uses to describe battlefield clashes.

The U.N. report, submitted by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to the Security Council and released by the world body’s mission in Afghanistan, notes a near-doubling in the number of attacks involving roadside bombs.

It describes an “alarming” 94% increase in bomb attacks from the same January-April period a year earlier. Roadside bombs planted by the Taliban and other insurgents are generally aimed at foreign troops, but because they are planted on routes used by everyone, they kill and maim many civilians as well.

The report also cites an average of three suicide bombings a week across Afghanistan, a growing number of them attacks involving more than one assailant, sometimes in combination with use of rockets, mortars and gunfire.

Targeted killings of Afghan officials had increased by 45%, the report says, with most taking place in the south, where the insurgency is strongest. The killings tend to target locally influential figures, such as tribal elders and other dignitaries who might be able to rally villagers and townspeople to resist the Taliban.

In one recent example, the district governor in Arghandab, a strategic gateway to the city of Kandahar, was killed in an insurgent bombing. NATO had touted the district as an area in which headway was being made in winning over the populace and improving security

Western officials have been describing their own campaign in the south as a combined political and military effort, and systematic assassinations appear aimed at sapping the will of local officials and others seen as cooperating with foreign forces or the Afghan government.

The U.N. report takes a more hopeful tone about some recent political developments, including nascent efforts by the government of President Hamid Karzai to woo Taliban foot soldiers away from the fight.

It notes, though, that “in general, the Taliban have reacted negatively to peace and reconciliation.”

Let’s reflect on this disastrous report, in light of Obama’s demonization and demagoguery of George Bush’s successful attempt to prevail in Iraq.

Obama attacked and undermined Bush’s incredibly successful troop surge:

“I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there,” he told MSNBC. “In fact, I think it will do the reverse.”

And then recently tried to take credit for it’s magnificent success via his Vice President:

On Larry King Live last night, Vice President Joe Biden said Iraq “could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You’re going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government.”

Obama is the consummate demagogue who demonized Bush in Afghanistan by claiming:

“We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.”

Condemn him as a failure and a disgrace according to his own demagogic standard.  He demonized Bush, when Bush succeeded.  How much more should we demonize Obama, as he’s utterly failing???

But this is worse than merely a failure of leadership.  Far worse.

Charles Krauthammer pointed out the sheer cynical depravity of Barack Obama and the Democrat Party as regards Iraq and Afghanistan by pointing to what the Democrats themselves said:

Bob Shrum, who was a high political operative who worked on the Kerry campaign in ’04, wrote a very interesting article in December of last year in which he talked about that campaign, and he said, at the time, the Democrats raised the issue of Afghanistan — and they made it into “the right war” and “the good war” as a way to attack Bush on Iraq.  In retrospect, he writes, that it was, perhaps, he said, misleading. Certainly it was not very wise.

What he really meant to say — or at least I would interpret it — it was utterly cynical. In other words, he’s confessing, in a way, that the Democrats never really supported the Afghan war. It was simply a club with which to bash the [Bush] administration on the Iraq war and pretend that Democrats aren’t anti-war in general, just against the wrong war.

Well, now they are in power, and they are trapped in a box as a result of that, pretending [when] in opposition that Afghanistan is the good war, the war you have to win, the central war in the war on terror. And obviously [they are] now not terribly interested in it, but stuck.

And that’s why Obama has this dilemma. He said explicitly on ABC a few weeks ago that he wouldn’t even use the word “victory” in conjunction with Afghanistan.

And Democrats in Congress have said: If you don’t win this in one year, we’re out of here. He can’t win the war in a year. Everybody knows that, which means he [Obama] has no way out.

Afghanistan was just a way to demagogue Bush in Iraq by describing Afghanistan – where Obama is failing so badly – as “the good war” and Iraq – where Bush won so triumphantly – as “the bad war.”  It was beyond cynical; it was flat-out treasonous.

George Bush selected Iraq as his central front for sound strategic reason.  Iraq had a despotic tyrant who supported terrorism.  Saddam Hussein needed to be removed to mount any kind of successful peace effort in the Middle East.  Iraq is located in the heart of the Arab/Islamic world.  It has an educated population relative to the rest of the region.  It also offered precisely the type of terrain that would allow American forces to implement their massive military superiority in a way that mountainous, cave-ridden Afghanistan would not.

Bush was determined to fight a war where he could win.  Obama foolishly trapped us in a war that would bleed us.  Why?  For no other reason than pure political demagoguery.  And he needs to be held accountable.

And where are we now under Obama’s failed leadership???

An article entitled, “Pentagon worried about Obama’s commitment to Afghanistan” ended with this assessment from a senior Pentagon official:

“I think they (the Obama administration) thought this would be more popular and easier.  We are not getting a Bush-like commitment to this war.”

See my piece from last year predicting this failure.  Read that article and explain to me where I was wrong, liberals.  I dare you.

American casualties under Obama in 2009 more than doubled compared to the total in 2008 when Bush was commander-in-chief.  And they are set to more than double this year compared to 2009.

From iCasualties, accessed June 21, 2010:

We’re paying attention to Obama’s massive, massive failure of leadership in the Gulf Coast.  That’s all well and good.  But don’t forget Obama’s massive failure of leadership in Afghanistan.

And just as we should rightly condemn Barack Obama for his demonization and demagoguery of Bush in Katrina, we should likewise condemn him for his demonization and demagoguery of Bush in Afghanistan.  We should hold Barack Hussein accountable to his own hypocritical, two-faced standards, and demand his resignation as a failure and a fraud.

Update, June 22: Heck, I wrote this yesterday, and hadn’t even published it yet when I discovered I needed to update.  Because now we now that Stanley McChrystal, commanding general in Afghanistan, thinks that Obama – and virtually every single man Obama has appointed in Afghanistan – are a bunch of clueless clowns.

McChrystal sided with his troops against his Failure-in-Chief once before.  I think he did it again to let his troops know that he understands the real problem facing them.

MSNBC has some of the highlights:

• McChrystal has seized control of the war “by never taking his eye off the real enemy: The wimps in the White House.”
• One aide called White House National Security Adviser Jim Jones, a retired four star general, a “clown” who was “stuck in 1985.”
• Obama agreed to dispatch an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan only after months of study that many in the military found frustrating. And the White House’s troop commitment was coupled with a pledge to begin bringing them home in July 2011, in what counterinsurgency strategists advising McChrystal regarded as an arbitrary deadline.
• The article portrayed McChrystal’s team as disapproving of the Obama administration, with the exception of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who backed McCrystal’s request for additional troops in Afghanistan.
• It quotes a member of McChrystal’s team making jokes about Biden, who was seen as critical of the general’s efforts to escalate the conflict and who had favored a more limited counter-terrorism approach. “Biden?” the aide was quoted as saying. “Did you say: Bite me?” Biden initially opposed McChrystal’s proposal for additional forces last year. He favored a narrower focus on hunting terrorists.

This, too, is another example of liberal hypocrisy.  What happened when Bush was depicted as not listening to his generals?  From the Washington Post, after Bush decided to pursue the (in hindsight) magnificently successful surge strategy:

This impulse may well expose Bush to more criticism from Democrats on Capitol Hill, who have sharply condemned him for not listening to Shinseki’s counsel in the beginning.

What’s it like to have your own fingers of demonization now pointing back at you?

Like I said, Obama is massively failing in Afghanistan.  Just like he’s massively failing everywhere else.

Update, June 26, 2010: Oh, by the way, get ready for what might be Obama’s “Abu Ghraib moment,” as videos of a mass slaughter of Afghani civilians makes its way to the public.

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