Readers,
Today, President Obama called for 30,000 more troops to be sent to Afghanistan. Saying this as a Libertarian Conservative Republican, this is a flawed decision that will backfire on the president in the coming years. Just as a disclaimer--I fulheartedly support the military, but I wholeheartedly disagree with President Obama's decision--my dad is a Vietnam vet.
From the start, this was a poorly managed war. President Bush's first mistake was allowing reporters to be embedded with the military while they were on their missions. Soldiers need to be able to carry out their duties and be able to focus fully on the mission; not have to watch out for some reporter who has no weapon on them and has no idea about how to fight. Another bad decision Bush made was letting the "Haditha killings" be prosecuted. Those Marines were innocent and Bush did nothing to stop it. Thank goodness JAG threw the case out. War was not meant to be fought with rules; war was meant to be fought with soldiers.
President Obama is setting himself up for failure with this decision. Firstoff, he will lose the far left anti-war base of the Democratic Party-the base that got him nominated in the first place! Then, if the strategy does not work, he will lose support and face the same fate President Lyndon Johnson did back in the 1960s with the war in Vietnam. Johnson lost a lot of support by staying in Vietnam and then lost the presidency.
If I was President Obama, I would use this stragegy. First, I would pull all troops out by year's end and replace them with fresh troops. I would then keep those fresh troops there in Afghanistan for a year and a half. For that year and a half, I would ask the military to do all they needed to secure the country within that time. After that time I would slowly withdraw the troops from Afghanistan and bring them home to stay. After that, I would then send the CIA on a worldwide manhunt to find Osama Bin-Laden within two years and have him [Bin-Laden] executed.
