All Politics All The Time

Like the old joke says, "Let's just declare victory and get the hell out of here."

President Barack Obama is gambling that his gradual military withdrawal from Afghanistan won’t prompt the tribal country to spin out of control in the next 12 months, but will help him run as a jobs-and-growth candidate in the 2012 election. (link here)

GAMBLING? With the lives of American military men and women, just so he can portray himself as a "jobs-and-growth candidate" in 2012? What jobs? What growth? What a loser.

In his speech, Obama said he would withdraw 10,000 by the end of the year, and another 33,000 by September 2012. Most of the remaining 66,000 U.S. troops will then be withdrawn by the end of 2014, he said.

September 2012 - right before the election. Coincidence? I think not.

He did not call for democracy in Afghanistan, nor legal rights for women, nor did he call for military victory, nor did he mention the military sacrifice of U.S. allies, such as the United Kingdom, Germany and Holland. He did discuss Iraq, but largely as a painful war from which he has withdrawn 100,000 soldiers. He did not repeat his earlier description of Iraq as an emerging democracy and an potential ally.

So what did we gain over there? All those lives for ... what ... political cover?

His much-anticipated announcement was planned for the same day that two bad-news reports were expected to hit the media. In the morning, the Congressional Budget Office predicted that the national debt would outgrow the nation’s annual income in 2021, and double again in another 15 years. The growth of health care spending contributes 80 percent of the problem, and the heavy debt will shrink the economy’s growth by 6 percent in 2025, and 18 percent by 2035, said the report.

That afternoon, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke delivered a bad-news economic message to the assembled TV cameras. “I believe slowdown is partly temporary and we’ll see greater growth going forward … [but because] we can’t explain the entire slowdown, growth in the near-term might be less than we anticipate.”

"we can’t explain the entire slowdown" ... well, here's a good place to start.

From another source:

Obama said the withdrawal of troops had been made possible because three objectives are now being fulfilled: a refocus on al-Qaeda instead of the Taliban; a reversal of the Taliban's momentum; and the training of Afghan National Security Forces to defend the country.

But to Afghans, it is not at all clear that the U.S. is achieving or has achieved any of these goals.

"We were expecting President Obama to make a political decision in the context of U.S. politics as he has an important election coming up in 2012. But we didn't expect it to be so many troops being pulled out and we didn't expect the withdrawal to be carried out over fighting seasons," Haron Mir, a former aid to Northern Alliance commander Ahmad Shah Masood, tells TIME. "We expected a few thousand, not 10,000."

The withdrawal of so many troops in so short a time, Mir says, will have serious repercussions for the security gains that have been made since the start of the surge. "General Petraeus and others have said that the Taliban's momentum has been broken. This announcement will certainly bolster the Taliban's morale," he says, echoing commonly-made predictions that announcements of a looming pull-out will incite Taliban insurgents to fight harder.

It's clear to me that the troop drawdown is a cynical, shameless, and politically-motivated sham engineered in a desperate attempt to boost obama's falling re-election chances. I'm not naive enough to believe that obama is the first person to do this, and he likely won't be the last, but that still doesn't excuse it.