Obama's incoherence on Afghanistan confuses allies

David Sanger, NY Times:

How do you persuade America’s allies to stick with the plan in Afghanistan when the strategy itself is being reconsidered — for the second time in six months?

That is one of President Obama’s primary challenges this week in New York as he tries for the first time to use his popularity around the world and his skills of persuasion at the United Nations — friendly but unfamiliar territory — to urge nervous allies to stick with what a month ago he called a “war of necessity.”

His problem is that many of those allies no longer consider Afghanistan as necessary a war as they once did. The surge in violence over the past year has prompted some countries — notably Italy, which spent this week mourning the loss of six soldiers — to debate pulling out. The presidential election in Afghanistan in August, which was the impetus for a surge in foreign troops into the country earlier this year, is now so mired in charges of voting fraud that it is doubtful whether President Hamid Karzai, if eventually declared the winner, will be considered legitimate by his own people.

Add to that the 66-page confidential memorandum to the president written last month by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the commander of American and NATO forces, with its blistering assessment of the performance of the allied forces. After years of fighting, he wrote, many of those allies are still bunkered behind high walls, so concerned about minimizing casualties that they do not engage with the Afghan people.

The publication of that internal memorandum, with its warning that failure to change the tide in the next 12 months would risk defeat, has laid bare a split between an American military that says it needs more troops now and an American president clearly reluctant to leap into that abyss. “The first question is: Are we doing the right thing?” Mr. Obama asked on CNN on Sunday.

To the allies here at the opening of the United Nations General Assembly, that is the right question. What worries them is that nine months into his presidency, and six months after announcing a new strategy focused on defeating Al Qaeda and its associates — notably the Taliban — Mr. Obama is asking it again.

...

Sanger is asking the right question. I think the answer is that Obama is not willing to stand up to the kook base of the Democrat party which is now as desperate for defeat in Afghanistan as they were in Iraq. They are now starting to admit their support for the war in Afghanistan was only a political ruse they use to cover their defeatist stance in Iraq.

Obama's dithering response to the military request will make it even more difficult for allies to cope with the cowardice in their own countries. What he is not showing is leadership.