Obama's latest gaffe on war

ABC News:

ABC News' David Wright and Sunlen Miller Report: Sporting a shiny new American flag pin at an appearance in Rush Limbaugh's hometown, Sen. Barack Obama came up with some novel reasons why the U.S. may be struggling in the war in Afghanistan.

"We don't have enough capacity right now to deal with it -- and it's not just the troops," Obama, D-Ill., told a crowd in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.

Obama posited -- incorrectly -- that Arabic translators deployed in Iraq are needed in Afghanistan -- forgetting, momentarily, that Afghans don't speak Arabic.

"We only have a certain number of them and if they are all in Iraq, then its harder for us to use them in Afghanistan," Obama said.

The vast majority of military translators in both war zones are drawn from the local population.
Naturally they speak the local language. In Iraq, that's Arabic or Kurdish. In Afghanistan, it's any of a half dozen other languages -- including Pashtu, Dari, and Farsi.

No sooner did Obama realize his mistake -- and correct himself -- but he immediately made another.

"We need agricultural specialists in Afghanistan, people who can help them develop other crops than heroin poppies, because the drug trade in Afghanistan is what is driving and financing these terrorist networks. So we need agricultural specialists," he said.

So far, so good.

"But if we are sending them to Baghdad, they're not in Afghanistan," Obama said.

Iraq has many problems, but encouraging farmers to grow food instead of opium poppies isn't one of them. In Iraq, oil fields not poppy fields are a major source of U.S. technical assistance.

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After seeing the report team Obama doubled down on ignorance.

UPDATE: Bill Burton, Obama campaign spokesperson, disputes this report, writing in to say, "This poorly researched and written piece is inaccurate in that it just completely ignores the need for Arabic translators in Afghanistan, and the need for agricultural specialists in Iraq. It is irresponsible to report such issues so matter-of-factly without checking out the actual facts. Please reference these very simple and easy to find websites to learn more about these issues: on the need for agricultural specialists in Iraq; and on the foreign fighters in Afghanistan.

To which, ABC News' David Wright responds:

Interesting pushback from the Obama campaign on this story. It begs a response.

They point out that the U.S. has indeed deployed agricultural experts to Iraq, in an effort to work with aid organizations to rebuild Iraq's food infrastructure. Other technical experts were deployed early on to southern Iraq to help rebuild the ravaged ecosystem of the Marsh Arabs, whom Saddam Hussein sought to exterminate. The U.S. and its allies sent much and varied assistance to the Iraqi people, including agricultural aid. My bad.

However, Obama's point seemed to be that the Iraq effort constituted a brain drain in the Afghanistan agricultural problems, that the experts deployed to Iraq would otherwise have gone to Afghanistan to encourage Afghan farmers to grow food not poppies. That strikes me –- as someone who has covered the conflicts in both countries extensively -- as doubtful.

The main problem now in both Iraq and Afghanistan is the lack of security, which makes it too dangerous for the experts to do their work.

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Actually some of the best farm help in Afghanistan are displaced farmers from Zimbabwe. They are having an impact as has the increasing prices for food. Because of the nature of the drug trade the farmers get a small fraction of the street value of the drugs. Food has become a completive commodity to poppies for the farmers. Another plus to food is that they are dealing with a higher quality purchaser.

There reassertion that Arabic translators are needed in Afghanistan still seems strained even if al Qaeda fighters make up part of the fighting force. The main function of the translators is to work with the locals to help find the bad guys. There are no Arab farmers in Afghanistan.

Like his previous gaffe on the Anbar Awakening, whenever Obama drifts from "hope" and "unity" into specifics he is in trouble.