My Obama prediction for 2011- Afghanistan pull out
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
I am making this prediction because I believe it will happen. Barack Obama has declared Afghanistan to be the good war and Iraq the bad one. He attempted to lose Iraq with steady calls of cut & run. He has no rationale for why Iraq was bad but Afghanistan was good. We were fighting AQ in both places when he entered the Senate, and his calls for retreat and defeat happened when Al Qaeda had declared Mesopotamia their central front and sent all their potential martyrs and resources there. At this pivotal time he was making exactly the wrong assessments and if we had followed his advice AQ and Iran would be divvying up stakes in the first conquest of the New Caliphate. His calls for "ending" (read losing) the Iraq war had everything to do with politics and nothing to do with strategy as I have outlined. His calls for reinforcing Afghanistan are equally political in nature and I believe were designed to inoculate him against charges of pacifism and an outright stance against war.
So, I believe he will surge troops into Afghanistan and allow General Petraeus to implement a new strategy in Afghanistan, and then....
This will happen and we will begin some of the counterinsurgency measures necessary to separate the people from the Taliban. US casualties will increase. Afghan casualties (fighters and civilians) will increase. Pakistan will continue to deteriorate. Progress will be made in some areas away from the Pakistan border. Pakistan casualties will increase (fighters and civilians) as we target Talibani and other Islamist leaders. There will be increased security in some areas away from the border, but balanced against increased insurgent violence. Car bombs and suicide bombers and beheadings and other forms of extreme violence will generate the same news cycle we saw in Iraq. This will give ammunition to Obama's weak left flank and those two forces will align against the efforts in Afghanistan. Quagmire will come back into play, as will Endless War and all the other short-sighted, ignorant misunderstandings of the left regarding the conduct of a long war.
Obama will need the support of the left, the Soros MoveOn $$$, and the media if he is to gain a second term, and he will begin a withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan well before they will have stabilized it.This will happen during mid to late 2011 so he can use it to campaign against any Republican who will be cast as a warmonger if they advocate a long term approach to the conflict. Obama does not want to be a war President, and I think he will shrug the mantle off before it sticks.
I hope to God I am wrong, but I see no reason to believe I am. There have been some signs of common sense in the very first decisions he has made on national security, but his political pragmatism will win out. There are too many forces on his team that want the military back in the barracks in the US where they belong. I HOPE Obama grows into the role of Commander in Chief and proves me wrong. If so I will flog myself for this piece in the public square. But I think we will be in for the same battle we fought against him, Reid, Pelosi, Murtha and the media to see Afghanistan through to any type of victory.