A report from U.S.-government-owned VOA News on November 13 quoted from President Obama’s statement made in a joint news conference in Tokyo with Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, in which Obama said he will soon decide how many additional troops to send to Afghanistan. The president attributed his delay in making his decision to his determination to "get it right."

Obama said that while U.S. policy on Afghanistan must protect America from terrorist networks, that commitment to Afghanistan is not "open-ended."

During the press conference, Obama stated that he and Prime Minister Hatoyama had discussed  U.S.-Japanese cooperation on Afghanistan and Pakistan and thanked the people of Japan and the Prime Minister for “the powerful commitment of a $5 billion over the next five years to support our shared civilian efforts in Afghanistan, as well as the commitment of a billion dollars to Pakistan.”

Jennifer Loven with AP asked the president: “on Afghanistan, if I might, can you explain to people watching and criticizing your deliberations what piece of information you're still lacking to make that call?” To which Mr. Obama replied:

In “Obama to Consider Four Afghan Troop Options,” a related article for The New American online posted on November 13, this writer discussed the heavy concentration of people associated with the Obama administration’s operations in Afghanistan who are members of the internationalist Council on Foreign relations. Most prominent among them are Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, and International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) commander, General Stanley McChrystal.

The latter two are reportedly not of the same mind when it comes to expanding the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The Washington Post reported that Eikenberry: “sent two classified cables to Washington in the past week expressing deep concerns about sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan until President Hamid Karzai's government demonstrates that it is willing to tackle the corruption and mismanagement that has fueled the Taliban's rise. Eikenberry's memos, sent as President Obama enters the final stages of his deliberations over a new Afghanistan strategy, illustrated both the difficulty of the decision and the deepening divisions within the administration's national security team.”

Curiously, CFR members are also counted among leading Republican figures who have been critical of Obama’s delay in deciding the future of the war — such as former Vice President Dick Cheney (who recently accused Obama of “dithering” in his troop decision) and Senator John McCain, Mr. Obama’s opponent in the race for the White House, who said last week that he was disappointed and angry that the president has delayed his Afghanistan decision.

While it is true that the CFR as an organization has always declined to take an official position on U.S government policy, its members have dominated the U.S. State Department since the Truman administration and have almost always used that influence to maneuver the United States into a series of undeclared wars under mandates from the United Nations or one of its subsidiary agencies such as SEATO or NATO.

The current disagreement we are witnessing among prominent CFR members, therefore, may be regarded more as a difference of opinion about method, rather than end goals. As to what those goals are, we should recall that all of the post-World War II military operations entered into under the direction of CFR-dominated administrations ended in stalemates or worse — culminating in the withdrawal of U.S. troops without the stated objective ever being achieved. Vietnam today, for example, is under complete communist control, despite our years of effort and over 50,000 U.S. lives lost.

During the war in Vietnam, President John Kennedy, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge, and Generals Lyman Lemnitzer, Maxwell Taylor, William Westmoreland, and Andrew Goodpaster were all CFR members.

Given the present leadership of our operations in Afghanistan, can we expect several more years of war, and thousands more casualties, followed by the eventual withdrawal of our troops, with the Taliban still in charge and al Qaeda still in place?

Perhaps that is what all of the disagreement over how many troops we should send to Afghanistan is all about — planned chaos.

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rprew

November 13, 2009

72.201.107.33

Votes: +7

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Getting it right

If Obama really wanted to "get it right", he would have opted for a total troop withdrawal, staged in a way to best protect the lives of those troops.

Our presence in Afghanistan is unconstitutional. Our presence in Afghanistan is NOT protecting America from terrorism. If anything, it is antagonistic and actually INCREASING the threat at home. Our presence in Afghanistan is costly to the economy, and costly to the lives and well being of our military personnel. Our presence is Afghanistan is not welcomed by the Afghani people. Our presence in Afghanistan is not protected the Afghani people, but actually endangering them.

Iraq is no different.

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