Posted by
Always To The Right on Tuesday, March 03, 2009 10:28:31 PM
My knowledge of conditions inside the country is, shall we say, highly
imperfect, but as I understand it, the Afghan security forces aren’t
anywhere near the levels of competence or manpower of their Iraqi
counterparts. Unless Murtha’s talking about some sort of cosmetic
effort to train whoever we can train in, say, six months before
hurriedly redeploying to Okinawa or wherever, then the “training” here
is going to take years and years and years. Which makes me think
“training” is just his version of a fig leaf for Obama’s surge, to give
the incoming troops some sort of finite mission the completion of which
will be grounds to start agitating for withdrawal. Those stirrings I mentioned a few weeks ago are really starting to stir now.
There is a double standard at work here, but it has less to do with
who’s in office than with the fact that the left’s painted itself into
a corner by using Afghanistan as a talking point against Iraq for the
past six years. Afghanistan’s the “good war” to which we should be
devoting our resources, the argument goes, not to the neocon rodeo in
Mesopotamia. Disparities in public support for the two missions over
the last four years have backed that position up. That being so, what
can the media do now when The One says he’s ready to send 17,000 troops
to Kabul except swallow hard?