Damn Right We Should Take Some Time On This One

TW: Some folks are urging Obama to commit the U.S. to a substantial escalation of our involvement in Afghanistan immediately without further review and without significant new strategies. This would be a foolish approach to what could be a seminal inflection point in American history. Afghanistan and Pakistan are strategic and our path chosen there will have ramifications for decades.

Post 9/11 in a fit of almost universal passion and anger (I amongst them) charged into Afghanistan to push out the Taliban but then we proceeded to wallow without a clear strategy and certainly without an effective policy. Eight years later we face a smorgasbord of shitty options. Wood does a nice job of framing the conundrum.

From David Wood at Politics Daily:
"...Even as criticism mounted that this "strategic review'' is taking too long, the officials sitting around the Situation Room conference table were confronting what may be the most complicated conflict the United States has ever become engaged in. Consider these brain-stunners, drawn from the views of senior commanders and national security officials:

-- The war cannot be won with military force alone. Yet, military force is virtually the only tool available to the commander in chief.
-- The war can't be won by the United States and its allies; it must be won by Afghans themselves and, specifically, by their government and security forces. Yet, they are demonstrably unable to do so.
-- Time is quickly running out, as the patience of Americans, Europeans and Afghans themselves wears thin. Yet, if there are strategies and tactics that will win the war, they each require years to take effect.-- Even to establish a holding pattern, to arrest the insurgent gains, will require tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops. Yet, manpower is the one resource that Americans and Europeans are most (and increasingly) reluctant to provide.
-- If something isn't done soon, the United States could lose.
--'Losing' would mean not only abandoning the American goal of preventing further attacks from the region on the United States, but more important, could accelerate the destabilization of nuclear-armed Pakistan next door.

So, it is not simply a matter of deciding whether or not to approve the request for 40,000 more troops, forwarded to the Pentagon two weeks ago by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan. McChrystal himself emphasized that point in the strategic assessment he forwarded to Washington last month: "Additional resources are required,'' he wrote, "but focusing on force or resource requirements misses the point entirely. The key take away from this assessment is the urgent need for a significant change to our strategy and the way that we think and operate...''
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/10/01/obamas-war-take-your-time/