Afghanistan is Not Fun to Think About for an Entire Day

I really wanted to devote a blog entry here to my thoughts and opinions on Afghanistan, and what I wanted to hear, going into Barack Obama's speech tonight. Then I had to work and didn't have time to do this before now.

Today was a hugely educational day for me. For some reason, a number of people have asked me what I think, which was flattering, but also eye-opening. I don't really "do" military policy. I don't learn about it, and I don't second-guess it. Y'know, unless it's a ridiculously, blatantly wrong-headed policy that has actual knowledgeable people (like former generals) out in the news saying "Whoa! No! Baaaaaad policy!" The way I see it, I don't know the entire hush-hush backroom, top-secret intel story, so maybe people who do know that have an idea of what's going on. Also, frankly, my friend's two sons are in the military, and one is currently in Afghanistan. The thought of sending him, or the children/brothers/sisters/mothers/fathers of anyone else into harm's way makes me physically ill.

BUT... I always feel like I should be informed, especially once people start asking my opinion about things, so I ran around the Internet on my phone all day. I read the text of Obama's speech. I read numerous foreign-policy-themed blogs. I read domestic-policy blogs. I found comments from all sorts of elected representatives.

So when I got this email from a friend, I felt comfortable enough to come up with a response.

On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 6:25 PM, Swarley wrote:

Hi DailyBlerg,

I just watched the President's speech on Afghanistan, then decided to watch FOX News to see how they were spinning it. Bill O'Reilly and Karl Rove were going on about how Obama is jeopardizing national security by setting a withdrawal date, and how he only committed to send a quarter of the troops requested by military leadership. Do you know if the latter is an accurate statement? The MSNBC commentary does not seem to be much better. It seems he pissed more people off with his decision, than he made happy. I'd like your thoughts, if you get a chance. Thanks.

Swarley

Here's my response, in full, because I'm too damn tired to come up with it all again:

Hi Swarley,

So first of all, let me just say that I was working tonight and couldn't watch the speech. However, I did read the text of it on my fancy Internet-phone, and then read some of my blogs to understand what all those highfalutin foreign policy words mean. Second of all, I don't generally delve to deeply into military policy, so I'm in just little over my head.

That being said, from everything I hear the highest number ever thrown around as to what General McChrystal was asking for was [at most!] 40,000 troops. For Obama's thirty-thousand-troop escalation to be a quarter of the request, McChrystal would have needed to have been asking for... one hundred and twenty thousand troops. I'm almost entirely sure that would be A.) insane and B.) not actually possible.

From to the Washington Independent [11/18]:

According to information compiled by the U.S. Army for The Washington Independent about the deployment status of active-duty and National Guard Army brigades, as of December 2009, there will be about 50,600 active-duty soldiers, serving in 14 combat brigades, and as many as 24,000 National Guard soldiers available for deployment. All other soldiers and National Guardsmen will either be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan already or ineligible to deploy while they rest from a previous deployment.

So, yeah, looks like Bill and Karl were lying, go figure.

Also, just general feelings about the escalation? This whole thing's kinda dumb, and I don't necessarily believe that the US is facing a credible threat from people hiding in caves between Afghanistan and Pakistan, but if that's true (which it could be since I am not privy to high-level intelligence briefs), this seems like a darn reasonable way of going about things.

Plus: timetables are always a good idea, both to get our troops home and to show that idiotic Karzai administration they need to get their act together.

Okay, that's all! Sorry if that's more than you wanted, it was suuuuuper slow at work and I had a lot of time to think about this!

~DailyBlerg

So that's what I think, in a nutshell. If we want to even remotely stabilize Afghanistan, the right way to do it is by working with actual human people populating the area instead of just blowing them all to hell. John Garamendi, the recently elected Congressman from CA-10 says that we can't make any progress over there unless we are actively working to help rebuild Afghanistan's infrastructure and get a real education system in place. Having seen Charlie Wilson's War, I agree, but the McChrystal everybody-arm-in-arm approach seems like the closest thing we've got to that right now.

You know what, I'm tired. I can't think about this anymore today. Tomorrow I just want to make fun of Chuck Grassley all day, and calculate electoral college politics.

So much easier.