War on Afghanistan all wrong, new (fatal?) decision coming soon

Today's Time.com 10-28-2009. Quoted 3 paragraphs.
Will Obama become the next Lyndon Johnson = war president = a total
failure, or will he have the audacity and courage to work a miracle =
peace?

Yet eight years of war with no end in sight leaves other military
experts vexed. "Having to a great extent captured, killed and
seriously disrupted the al-Qaeda leadership and training
infrastructure in Afghanistan, the necessity, and therefore the
strategy for this war, has gotten away from us," Air Force Major
Jeremy Kotkin, a strategist with the U.S. Special Operations Command,
wrote on Aug. 31 in Small Wars Journal, an independent
counterinsurgency blog. "We have transferred the consequence of the
very real threat of al-Qaeda to the Taliban, to fields of Afghan
poppies, and to the political and economic shambles that was and is
Afghanistan." Such mission creep, he says, has made the nation's task
in Afghanistan far tougher than originally intended.

Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel, says the drone strikes are
paying off in Pakistan because of that nation's "quasi-legitimate
government and reasonably effective army" — neither of which
Afghanistan has. "So I don't think we can say the methods employed in
Pakistan are the right template for Afghanistan." But he does call the
war "misguided and unnecessary" and says the U.S. should work with the
country's tribal chiefs to ensure stability in their respective
valleys. And offshore spy-and-strike capabilities could, at a minimum,
keep al-Qaeda off balance in the region "and optimally destroy
whatever entity is engaged in a plot."

Beyond such tactical issues, Bacevich, who served in Vietnam, is
baffled by the willingness of today's U.S. Army officers to engage in
a never-ending counterinsurgency. "If you're in my generation, it is
simply extraordinary that we now have an officer corps that accepts
protracted, morally ambiguous warfare as its destiny," says Bacevich,
now a professor at Boston University. "They have embraced this as the
new American way of war, heedlessly, thoughtlessly and — in terms of
what the larger interests of the country require — very foolishly."
Obama will be weighing precisely those larger interests in the days
ahead.

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Will Barack Obama become the next Lyndon Johnson = war president = a
total failure, or will he have the audacity and courage to work a
miracle = peace?
We are waiting anxiously and we still have hope but we are not
expecting anything good.
The US warmaking machine (industrail-military complex) with its bought
politicians is just too powerful.
Michael McKinley
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