I am stunned by the angry reaction to Obama's common sense approach in Afghanistan. I disagree with him on his handling on the economy, but generally trust him abroad. Briefly, I have taken down some points I feel need to be made.
There are a few facts that many posters ignore:
- Presidents are not omnipotent
- Presidents do not operate in a vacuum. We all know how republicans and some democrats screwed us financially and foreign policy wise
- The American democracy has blatant weaknesses
- This country is unaware of what is going on in the world. That includes many of you. You would rather ignore the mutilation and blatantly animal-like behavior of the Taliban for no reason. The president has failed to make the moral case for this war, but that does not mean he doesn't see one. I am stunned you don't
Leaving Afghanistan to the Taliban = Never going into Darfur
- Obama has some commitments from weak isolationist Europeans
- Pakistan is a failed state from its inception and now has nuclear weapons. It is conceivable that they detonate a nuclear device somewhere in the US.
- The Iraq war was a disaster, but the surge worked better than anyone thought possible
- If abandoned Afghanistan and Pakistan will fall to the Taliban, and that's everybody's problem
President Obama is presenting the Generals, the Pashtun tribal leaders and Karzai a chance to show that their ideas can give tangible results. I trust him that these are not "open-ended" results, rather he is being intentionally vague. They have two years and an extra $100B to achieve real progress that will result in somewhat stable governance.
And a final point:
America was never all that innocent as a country. Roosevelt (and Churchill's and Stalin's on their part) never cared to prevent fascism and had agreements with Hitler. However, and despite the evil interventions worldwide since, Obama's admission of a "not so innocent" country presents a major turn in foreign policy and if followed through, a turn in the future of the world.