Obama has had neither the political gonads or the moral decency to have admitted that any continued sacrifice of American lives in Afghanistan would be, and has been dishonorable once he quit caring about any true success there.
His half-hearted commitment to a surge there was just that, half-hearted, forcing politics in the Pentagon to please him to accept less of a ommitment than they knew was needed. As his half-hearted commitment proved it was not going to succeed, it became CYA time for the PR machines at the Pentagon and the WH, just until they could pull out and call defeat - returng the Taliban to the position of ascendent power in Afghanistan - a “victory”.
Like Eastwood said, Obama is a hoax.
I say all this because had Obama had the moral clarity to take the political hits from ending - immediately, any pretense that he was committed to any real victory in Afghanistan, it would have bumped him up a few notches in stature. Instead, he fulfilled my expectations of him, which were very low.
Was any of our wartime successes in the past inevitable? No. They succeeded when our commitment knew no bounds. In WWII we succeded because we were committed enough to winning that we chose to throw everything we could into doing that. Any “superior tactics” or equipment were a result of that commitment, a response to that committment, without which many of them would never have arisen. I have firmly believed that only such a committment was going to clean house in Afghanistan, but neither administration wanted to or believed they would succeed at asking for it. So they made a good “coaltion of the willing” show of it, but, in my mind, have seldom been fully committed to it - at least not as much as their PR machines would have us believe.
Well said.