The Eternal Optimist (on Obama)

Andrew Sullivan shares his growing optimism about Obama's surge:

The moral question is simply whether it is right to send young men and women to die for a couple more years to make an exit less dangerous and more face-saving than simply quitting now.

By giving the military a chance to inflict maximal damage on the Taliban and the CIA lee-way to do the same to al Qaeda within Pakistan, Obama means to achieve maximal weakening of foes before a strategic withdrawal.

Any withdrawal will be met with Romney-Palin-style accusations of weakness, treason, irresolution. But a withdrawal after a big surge is less likely to be successfully targeted in that manner. And after ten years, will Americans really want to keep 100,000 troops in a lunar landscape run by a kleptocracy because that's where al Qaeda used to hang out? The more I think about this, the smarter it is - both militarily and politically.

But that tends to happen with Obama decisions, doesn't it?

Then, in a later post, he adds this:

Obama couldn't fake a conviction he doesn't have and that few adults at this point could truly feel. What he has done instead is replace rhetorical drama with an influx of troops so swift and so large it could alter the dynamic on the ground and give us one more chance to break al Qaeda's back before a withdrawal in our long-term strategic interest.

I don't understand why Sullivan can't see that our enemy in Afghanistan is no longer the international jihadist movement Al-Qaeda but rather the tribal Afghan insurgency called the Taliban.