IT SEEMS that President Obama will finally unveil his Afghan strategy next week, probably in a speech on Tuesday evening.
He held a two hour meeting last night in the situation room to discuss it with all the usual big names--Robert Gates, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden.
Steve Holland of Reuters observes:
A picture of the meeting released by the White House showed [that] budget director Peter Orszag also participated -- a sign that the cost of sending more troops is also being discussed.
Could it be that Mr Obama is hoping to pacify the Hindu Kush on the cheap?
David Obey, the head of the House Appropriations Committee, certainly hopes so. As told ABC news:
There ain't going to be no money for nothing if we pour it all into Afghanistan.
He worries that the war will derail the Democrats' ambitious domestic plans:
That's what happened with the Vietnam War, which wiped out [President Lyndon Johnson's plan for a] Great Society...That's what happened with the Korean War, which wiped out Harry Truman's Square Deal. That's what happened with the end of the progressive movement before the '20s when we went into World War I. In each case, the cost of those wars shut off our ability to pay for anything else.
Mr Obey proposes a surtax on moderately rich people to pay for the war, just to make sure that people know how much it is costing them.
But a leaker tells McClatchy that the president is going to send 34,000 more troops--nearly as many as Gen McChrystal asked for.
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Oops, I meant Al-Zarqawi. We're still on the hunt for Al-Zawahiri, who played a role in changing the NYC skyline a few years ago....
Pacer, that's what happens when you ditch a major war in one big country in order to fight a major war in a second big country before the first major war is one.
The CIA's intelligence network in the Muslim world was and continues to be pathetic (type in, "WMD Slam Dunk George Tenet," into Google for evidence of that). It took the US several years to kill Al-Zawahiri in Iraq...and that was the war we were focusing on.
OK, so we've been in Afganistan for the better part of 7 years. Are you telling me that hasn't been enough time for the CIA/NSA to identify and recruit sufficient local operators to keep a close eye on things in the absence of a large conventional military expedition? With a network of local informants and a handful of small, defensible aerial drone bases wouldn't that give us all we need to prevent Afganistan from again becoming a terrorist sanctuary? What could that cost? A few billion a year--certainly much less than the cost of losing the latest attempt at the Great Game?
I'm also intrigued by the idea of facilitating an organized market in opium. Could solve our problem of illicit cartel profits flowing to terrorists, gives our financial traders something to do flog besides mortgages for hapless lower middle-class Americans, and might even put a little gum in the works of the Chinese leviathan...
Just put Goldman Sachs in charge of creating a commodities market for opium. Soon it will be so expensive no one will be able to afford drugs any longer.
We can't leave Afghanistan. "Leaving" means "losing." The Taliban-Al Qaeda coalition that attacked us is still at large in Afghanistan and Pakistan. You can only spin it domestically. The rest of the world sees through it.
Why would we consider such a surrender before we considered creating a legitimate market for opium? If we're not sure we can beat the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, why do we still seem to think we can beat a plant that was around over a million years before the Taliban?
There was always something repellent in W's way of war - cut taxes on the rich, send the children of the poor to fight and die.
I've long felt that the only way to insure that we only get involved in wars that are worth the sacrifice is to pass a law requiring that any military operations be paid for entirely through either new taxes or spending cuts explicitly linked to paying for the conflict. Not one dime should be paid for in the form of debt.
Of course, to allow for the possiblity of WWIII there should be an escape clause. If a large scale draft is institutued than the spending provisions can be relaxed. This would set the bar high enough that only a fight for our survival would allow this to be circumvented.
The biggest problem however is that sense Congress can make laws even if something like this was instituted than it could simply be eliminated as soon as it becomes inconvenient. An unavoidable problem in malleable human institutions.
"...proposes a surtax on moderately rich people to pay for the war..."
Or --for a truly wild and wacky idea-- we can get OUT of the f***ing place!