Support the President
Beyond the squabbling and behind the mission.
by Frederick W. Kagan and William Kristol
12/14/2009
President Obama has ordered sufficient reinforcements to Afghanistan to execute a war strategy that can succeed. We applaud this decision. And we urge everyone to rally round the effort to defeat our enemies and accomplish objectives vital to America's national security.
Obama's decision, and the speech in which it was announced, were not flawless. The president should have met his commander's full request for forces. He should not have announced a deadline for the start of the withdrawal of U.S. forces. He should have committed to a specific and significant increase in the size of the Afghan National Security Forces. He should also have explained more clearly the relationship between defeating the Taliban and defeating al Qaeda, the significance of such a victory, and the reasons his Afghan strategy can succeed. The secretaries of defense and state, as well as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made those arguments far more compellingly in subsequent congressional testimony than the president did at West Point.
We shouldn't miss the forest for the trees, however. When all the rhetorical and other problems are stripped away, the fact remains that Obama has, in his first year in office, committed to doubling our forces in Afghanistan and embraced our mission there. Indeed, the plan the president announced on Tuesday features a commendably rapid deployment of reinforcements to the theater, with most of the surge forces arriving over the course of this winter, allowing them to be in position before the enemy's traditional fighting season begins.
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National security has been a polarizing issue in American politics for a long time. Democrats--including, unfortunately, many in the Obama administration--still want to blame the Bush administration for all our woes. Republicans can't resist focusing on the flaws in the president's plan and annoying aspects of his West Point speech. Everyone wants to relitigate past fights. In the case of Afghanistan--a war both parties have agreed is vital to our national interest, with tens of thousands of American soldiers already on the line and more on the way--we should get beyond the squabbling.
Republicans will have the opportunity--and the responsibility--to criticize this administration's policies toward Iran, China, and Russia; its defense budgets; and its detainee policies, to say nothing of its domestic policy initiatives. Democrats will respond. But the president's announcement of a sound and feasible strategy in Afghanistan gives us a chance to show to ourselves and the world that politics really can stop at the water's edge when the nation's safety is at stake and our troops are fighting on our behalf.
So we say: Support the troops. Support the mission. Support the president.
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http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/017/307lxxjy.asp
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