This promises to be an interesting fall on many fronts. The Heritage Foundation, a Right-wing aligned Republican think tank, published a reply to Sen. Kerry's Wall St. Journal OpEd from the other day. It is just an opening salvo and argued by a junior associate from Heritage, but still worth noting:
Senator Kerry asserts that “we should not commit troops to the battlefield without a clear understanding of what we expect them to accomplish, how long it will take, and how we maintain the consent of the American people.”
While it is necessary to review tactics and strategy, fighting a war requires leadership, not decision-making by polls and consensus. It puts the fate of the Afghan people and our troops into the hands of bureaucrats and pundits, holding it hostage to endless meetings and hearings that may confuse the mission, lengthen decision time, and put our troops in greater danger.
Afghanistan is no Vietnam. We are not fighting a hostile government and an organized military, but Taliban insurgents and al-Qaeda. The only real lesson from the Vietnam War is that we must fight to win, and doing that means we have to commit the resources we need, for as long as it takes.
The arguments against staying in Afghanistan are going to induce some deja vu, really soon. Might want to go back and read certain Kerry speeches from 2006 on Iraq and get the underlying logic, because it is very similar to what the good and true Senator from MA is starting to articulate now.
(Read the OpEd
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=273x101810">here and see what I mean:)
From that article:
It’s time to refocus our military efforts from the failed occupation of Iraq to what we should have been doing all along: destroying al-Qaida. We need to redeploy troops from Iraq — keep up the training and counter-terror operations, establish an over the horizon military capacity — and free up resources to fight the War on Terror.
Every time President Bush tells the Iraqis we will “stay as long as it takes,” he is giving squabbling Iraqi politicians an excuse to take as long as they want to. Iraqi leaders have responded only to deadlines. So we must set another deadline to extricate our troops and get Iraq up on its own two feet — a clear deadline of July, 2007. As our generals have said, the war cannot be won militarily. “Staying the course” isn’t far-sighted; it’s blind. Leaving our troops in the middle of a civil war isn’t resolute; it’s reckless. Half of the service members listed on the Vietnam Memorial Wall died after America’s leaders knew our strategy would not work. It was immoral then and it would be immoral now to engage in the same delusion.
It is not exactly the same, of course. Nothing ever is. But it is similar logic to what the Senator is starting to say about Afghanistan. Check out this NPR radio interview, done 9/29/09:
http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=2or
http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=113316238&m=113316225