Ralph Peters at the New York Post has been a reliable commentator throughout the last decade on teh wars in the middle east so when he offers his opinion on what we should do in Afghanistan, as he does in this column, it's wise to listen.
Peters writes that the President is faced with essentially three options: He can give McChrystal the troops he's asking for to suppress the insurgency, he can adopt the Biden strategy of waging war surgically in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, or he can essentially do nothing by sending a token increase of troops to Afghanistan.
The surprise for me was that Peters thinks McChrystal is wrong and Biden is right. He also fears that President Obama will make the worst of the three choices which is to do nothing:
The evidence on the ground, the lessons of history, and our real security needs strongly favor the Biden approach, but giving Gen. Stan McChrystal the full surge he wants would be far better than "more of the same, with new slogans."
This president has to make a decision. A real decision. But it looks like he's going to wiggle, squirm and dodge, then go in front of the teleprompter to vote "present" again.
Worsening the muddle, the troop-level debate is being disgracefully politicized on all sides.
Obama's seeking the least politically damaging choice, rather than the most effective military approach. He's less concerned with winning than with avoiding blame.
Shameful, shameful, shameful.
Meanwhile, too many conservatives are doing to Obama what they rightly decried when the left did it to Bush: Dems used Iraq as a club to beat Bush; now Republicans want to wield Afghanistan against Obama. Hey, this is about our national security and the lives of those in uniform -- not scoring cheap political points.
Shameful, shameful, shameful.
Read the whole thing. It's pretty interesting, especially his assessment of General McChrystal.
RLC
