Obama did not get the strategy he expected from McChrystal

Max Boot:

During last year's campaign, Barack Obama stressed that while he wanted to withdraw from Iraq, he was no pacifist. "As president," he said on July 15, 2008, "I will make the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban the top priority that it should be. This is a war that we have to win."

He began to make good on his word on March 27 when he announced a "comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan" that included 21,000 additional troops. The goal, he said, was to "reverse the Taliban's gains" and "prevent Afghanistan from becoming the Al Qaeda safe haven that it was before 9/11."

On Aug. 30, the president's handpicked commander in Afghanistan delivered a plan to do just that. Implementing his counterinsurgency strategy, Gen. Stanley McChrystal wrote, "requires more forces." If extra troops are not sent, and soon, the "likely result" would be "failure."

One would expect, based on his past statements, that Obama would rush to give McChrystal the forces needed to win what the president described in August as a "war of necessity." Yet that's not the case. The White House has been sitting on the general's report for a month, refusing to allow him to submit his resource request or testify to Congress and leaking to the news media that the president may decide to downsize the entire war effort.

Why this sudden hesitation after so many months of resolute rhetoric? Surely the president cannot be getting cold feet simply because of rising American casualties. Losses are tragic but expected in a tough fight.

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Vice President Joe Biden favors a smaller-scale strategy that would employ high-tech weapons and special forces to kill terrorists from afar. But such a strategy has rarely, if ever, succeeded. It has been employed by Israel against Hamas and Hezbollah. The result: Hamas controls Gaza, and Hezbollah controls southern Lebanon. It has been employed by the U.S. in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The result: The Taliban controls western Pakistan and large swaths of eastern and southern Afghanistan.

There is no reason to expect, given its long record of failure, that this strategy will work, and no one knows that better than McChrystal, who was in charge of special operations forces hunting terrorists in Iraq for years. Such operations are useful but not decisive, because terrorist leaders can always be replaced. Only by placing security forces among the population can a government prevent terrorists from creating havens.

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There is more.

Obama chose McChrystal because he wanted to go to the chase strategy. McChrystal is very good at it, but he is also wise enough to recognize it will not defeat an enemy without other troops to protect the people and gain from them the intelligence needed to find the enemy and destroy them. I think the dithering is more about trying to solve the political problem caused by McChrystal's request that it is about concern over the strategy. I think the delay will only make matters worse.

We should put in place a forced that can protect the people and crush the enemy. Al Qaeda has been very threatening of late, but short on delivering on those threats. Besides the failures in this country, al Qaeda also tried to intimidate German voters, but wound up on the losing end of that election. If German voters are willing to stand up to intimidation about their meager forces in Afghanistan, surely America can too with proper leadership.