Obama teams misleading blame shifting on Afghanistan

Karl Rove:

In an interview with CNN's John King on Sunday, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said President Obama is now asking tough questions about Afghanistan "that have never been asked on the civilian side, the political side, the military side and the strategic side." It was a not so subtle dig at Mr. Obama's predecessor and was meant to distract from the White House's mishandling of the war.

The Bush administration did in fact conduct a top-to-bottom strategic review of Afghanistan in 2008. That review was provoked by two developments.

The first was that Pakistan's government wobbled starting in 2006. It cut deals with tribes that created safe havens for the Taliban and al Qaeda and then became distracted from fighting terrorism as President Pervez Musharraf was pressured to leave office and replaced by a new democratic government. The second was al Qaeda's decision to refocus its efforts on Afghanistan after having been driven from Iraq.

After consultations with the Obama transition team, the Bush administration's strategic review was not released nor were its recommendations implemented. Instead, the review was handed over to the incoming president. Drawing on it, Mr. Obama announced a "comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan" on March 27.

Emphasizing the need to destroy al Qaeda and defeat the Taliban as it attempted to regain control of the country, Mr. Obama supported his new Afghan strategy by dispatching 21,000 additional troops. In June he also named a new commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

On Aug. 30, Gen. McChrystal warned in an assessment sent to the Pentagon that the war could be lost unless the U.S. sent more combat troops to the country. Inexplicably, Mr. Obama did little about the general's assessment until it was leaked to the public. This led to a Sept. 30 situation-room meeting—the first of five on Gen. McChrystal's report.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has made winning the war harder by mismanaging the U.S.'s relationship with the Afghan government. Mr. Obama refused to take a call from Afghan President Hamid Karzai after his recent disputed election, a confidante to Mr. Karzai told me. That same confidante also said that the Afghan president was dismayed when political strategist James Carville, who has close ties to both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Mr. Emanuel, became an adviser to Ashraf Ghani, who ran against Mr. Karzai. Mr. Karzai took that as a sign that Mr. Obama was encouraging opposition to him. And, finally, administration figures have raised doubts about the White House's confidence in Afghanistan's government. In his interview on CNN on Sunday, for example, Mr. Emanuel questioned "whether, in fact, there's an Afghan partner."

Mr. Karzai has now conceded that he didn't win his recent election and has agreed to a run-off. If Mr. Karzai does prevail, alienating him will have only complicated the task of waging a campaign against the Taliban.

There is also the heavy whiff of politics in the administration's war deliberations. The president's senior political adviser, David Axelrod, apparently attends war cabinet meetings—something I did not do as President Bush's senior political adviser.

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This story and the one below on VP Cheney's speech on the policy suggest a fundamental dishonesty in the administrations political reaction to the Afghan policy they adopted early on. You can see the misleading nature of that policy in the comment to the Cheney post below.

One of the places where the liberals go off the tracts is their fundamental misunderstanding of al Qaeda's reaction to the Iraq war. It was in fact a huge distraction for al Qaeda, which used all its resources to fight there rather than in Afghanistan. They only started redirecting their resources to Afghanistan after they clearly lost in Iraq as a result of our surge of forces there and our commitment to a counterinsurgency strategy. Rove gets this, but many in the Obama administration are trying to ignore the facts.