War of Necessity

Barack Hussein Obama campaigned on the premise that Iraq was a war of choice, where under his leadership, the US would quickly withdraw our forces, while Afghanistan was a war of necessity- the good war where at all costs, we must maintain the fight. As President, Obama reformulated strategy and put in place his own commander, General Stanley McChrystal- a master of counter-insurgency techniques from a special forces background. Obama and the general concluded that our footprint in country had been too haphazard with the Afghan people damaged over and over again by our forces who were there after all to liberate and protect them from the al Qaeda-shielding Taliban. A troop surge was initiated and tighter rules of engagement were imposed on our forces whose mission tempo and objectives increased. Obama would pacify and protect larger swathes of the country where the Taliban held sway. Our casualties by necessity, skyrocketed and Obama lost his nerve, his faith in his hand-selected commander, and started to equivocate. He has dallied on sending the additional forces that his field commander and military advisers say can stop the slide. Afghanistan has been transformed into a chaotic debacle. The ultimate irony will be if Obama abandons Afghanistan to her own fate and that country becomes a jihad Wahhabist state, particularly when the US imposed a fight against the same  reactionary forces of Islam in neighboring nuclear-armed Pakistan that neither the former military government nor the civilian/secular government that replaced it wanted to fight. Obama will pull up stakes and preserve our forces while keeping those who live in the neighborhood in relentless danger with women losing all human rights and subjecting us ultimately to much graver danger as he shows the US to once again be a casualty adverse paper tiger as was demonstrated years before in Somalia. We will fuel jihad the world over and hearten those we are trying to defeat by projecting weakness when what we most needed to show was strength.