What I'm hearing and thinking is that the Obama administration is going to move ahead with a full-fledged counterinsurgency/nation-building in Afghanistan. From what I've read recently about Obama's advisors, it becomes clear to me that the bulk of his national security thinkers, such as those in the Center for a New American Security, are the new thinkers for counterinsurgency, such as John Nagl, who wrote the new army field manual in counterinsurgency. They believe in this. And they, as David Brooks wrote today, don't have a sense of the 'limits of their knowledge.' They are young and full of themselves. Liberal idealists. Just like the ones who took us into Vietnam 45 years ago.
A recent post of mine with an interview with Andrew Bachevich goes into more detail on this.
The real problem the administration has is with a public, and especially Obama's voters, who don't want anything like that to happen. So he has to somehow 'bring them along' or risk losing their support. My guess that a lot of this deliberation is being done for that reason. If that sounds cynical, so be it. But this is a real dilemma for Obama: not whether to do full counter-insurgency, but how to bring his supporters, or at least enough of them, along for the ride.
I'm not going along for that ride.
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