Obama's Speech

I watched Obama's speech about Afghanistan tonight with a sinking feeling in my stomach. I don't know what he's trying to achieve and how "victory" will be defined. After a litany of how we got into the mess in the first place, he laid out his plan to defeat the Taliban so that they can't invite Al Quaeda back in and give them a safe haven. Exactly how Afghanistan differs from other terrorist-harboring failed states like Somalia or Yemen or parts of the Philipines or Indonesia, he doesn't say. And we have to keep fighting them so that the Pakistanis, who have their own Taliban/Al Queda problem will keep fighting them in the border areas. He going to do this by providing security and training Afghan soldiers and police so that they can do the job when we leave. The number of 400,000 Afghan security forces has been thrown around before, but I've never heard how the country can possibly support them. Last year Afghanistan had an estimated GDP of about $22B. At $5000 to equip, house, and maintain each soldier or policeman, their entire GDP would soon be gone. So I guess that even if we're successful, we'll be supporting Afghanistan financially forever.

The one bright spot in the speech was his promise of financial transparency. If the war is on the budget, and Congress has to debate and vote on the expenditures necessary to maintain it, it could make the Congress responsible for at least some of the coming debacle.

I don't know who was the intended audience for this speech. If you watched the speech, you could see that the young cadets were polite and more or less engaged, but the military brass looked positively pained by it all. The right will mock and block whatever he does; the left is leaving him in droves (MoveOn.org today announced their opposition to the Afghan surge); and the vast middle is just sick and tired of it all. I can't think of any block of people whose confidence he's gained.

He certainly has lost mine.