Asked at a news conference in Japan what information he still needed to enable him to make a decision, Obama said it was not matter of awaiting a piece of data.
Instead, he said, "It's a matter of making certain that when I send young men and women into war and devote billions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer money, that it's making us safer and that the strategies that are in place, not just on the military side but also on the civilian side, are coordinated and effective in our primary goal."
The ultimate aim, he said, was to protect America and its allies from attack.
"I recognize that there have been critics of the process," Obama said. "They tend not to be folks who I think are directly involved in what's happening in Afghanistan."
He said that when he does arrive at a decision, he wants to be able to clearly explain to the American people the aim of his plan and what it will entail.
"It will also, I think, send a clear message that our goal here ultimately has to be for the Afghan people to be able to be in a position to provide their own security and that the United States cannot be engaged in an open-ended commitment," Obama said.
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http://www.reuters.com/article/featuredCri... Two peeves about these comments. One is skepticism about the assertion that there is something he's putting together which will make us 'safer'. Our very military presence in Afghanistan has been shown to be counterproductive in that individuals bent on violent acts of resistance to the NATO advance on their homeland are increasing in numbers and violence faster than we can put them down.
The notion that preserving the Karzai government in power behind our nation-building will produce some definable measure of security for the U.S. is ludicrous. The man and regime are generating enemies of the state above and beyond the animosity Afghans have reserved for the foreign invaders. The tenuous deals the military forces have struck with warlords and others in control of Afghan territory beyond Kabul are not sustainable by ours or Karzai's will alone. They've been bribed to give access and movement of troops and that can't go on indefinitely. I wonder what events or situation on the ground the president will point to as he explains that his troops decision will make us 'safer'. In my view, only a deliberate exit can achieve those - for our troops in the field and for American interests and security at home and abroad. The president asserts that our commitment isn't 'open-ended', but I wonder how long he intends to drag his feet in getting us out of there, and what specifically he expects our troops to do in the interim.
'Training' Afghan forces will undoubtedly be a prominent part of the mission he's coordinating. That's not a certain process, as we see in Iraq, with our forces still in place waiting for the Maliki regime and their army to assume responsibility for their own security. Hell, Maliki told the U.S. years ago that we could leave and that Iraq would be just fine. The problem is that there's an institutional drag on these deployments where the U.S. never seems satisfied they've consolidated enough power to stand down. I'll be interested to hear the president's full rationale behind these ideals he's expressed.
The other 'peeve' I have with the comments is the notion that 'critics' "tend not to be folks who I think are directly involved in what's happening in Afghanistan" (even though he's correct to blast the political sniping of republicans accusing him of 'dithering'). If the president is doing his job in communicating effectively and candidly, there should be nothing about his mission in Afghanistan which the American people can't fully understand enough to make a decision or make an informed judgment about his actions - even critical ones.
