By Steve Hynd
It occurs to me that this is probably intimately connected to my last post - Senator Feingold saying he'd likely vote against any further troop increases - and shows that opposition to the senseless Surge (tm) is gaining ground.
WASHINGTON, Aug 5 (Reuters) - An assessment of the war in Afghanistan by the top U.S. and NATO commander there is no longer expected by mid-August and will not include a request for extra troops, the Pentagon said on Wednesday.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates had asked U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal to complete an assessment 60 days after he took command in Afghanistan in mid-June.
But Gates gave McChrystal additional instructions and extra time to finish the review when they met at a U.S. air base in Belgium on Sunday with other top U.S. defense officials, Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said.
"The secretary has told General McChrystal to take beyond the 60 days if needed, so he anticipates getting this final product in late August, early September at this point," Morrell told reporters.
"It will not offer specific resource requests or recommendations," he added.
He said any request for additional forces would go through the normal Pentagon channels for approval.
McChrystal's review - the fifth review of Af/Pak strategy since Obama took office - will now come after the Afghan presidential election on August 20th. Depending on how well that goes the argument from the interventionist hawks who constitute Washington's Very Serious people will be just like the ones we saw in Iraq: either "we need more troops to preserve gains" if it goes well or "we need more troops to prevent the disaster of the world seeing America getting its butt kicked by goatherders" if it goes badly. Either way, they'll still argue for more troops.
The new timeline also gives the Pentagon and the VSP's time to pressure recalcitrant lawmakers on the Hill and any dubious White House staffers. The fight to extricate America and its allies from the Af/Pak COIN quagmire isn't over yet - but the public debate about whether nation building over decades, at an enormous cost in blood and treasure, is the right thing to do may have actually begun at last.
No comments:
Post a Comment