President Obama visited Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery on Veterans Day in 2009. Section 60 is where many American soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq are buried. Credit Luke Sharrett/The New York Times
Mark Landler, New York Times: The Afghan War and the Evolution of Obama
A strategy that went from a “good war” to the shorthand “Afghan good enough” reflects the president’s coming to terms with what was possible in Afghanistan.
WASHINGTON — President Obama’s advisers wrestled with an intractable problem in the spring and summer of 2015: How could they stabilize Afghanistan while preserving Mr. Obama’s longtime goal of pulling out the last American troops before he left office?
As it happened, the president solved the problem for them. In early August of that year, when Mr. Obama convened a meeting of the National Security Council, he looked around the table and acknowledged a stark new reality.
“The fever in this room has finally broken,” the president told the group, according to a person in the meeting. “We’re no longer in nation-building mode.”
What Mr. Obama meant was that no one in the Situation Room that day, himself included, thought that the United States — after 14 years of war, billions of dollars spent and more than 2,000 American lives lost — would ever transform Afghanistan into a semblance of a democracy able to defend itself.
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WNU Editor: A must read post.
1 comment:
If we had been in it to win it, Karzai's brother would have been double tapped messily and in such a manner that Karzai would not squawk.
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