Trapped in Afghanistan Between Obama and the Taliban

November 26, 2014 by Daniel Greenfield

Never before has an administration been so casual about putting American troops in harm’s way to protect a politician’s approval ratings.

American forces were supposed to be out of Afghanistan by the end of 2014, but in a covert acknowledgement that Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq was a disaster, that isn’t happening.

Afghanistan has been Obama’s bloodiest war and his most neglected war. It’s a war that hardly appears in major papers anymore, but while in terms of damage done Iraq and Libya may be Obama’s biggest disasters, in terms of American lives lost there’s no question that Afghanistan was his worst war.

Obama never had a strategy for Afghanistan. As best as anyone could determine he made a major commitment to it to provide political cover for his Iraq withdrawal. Once he committed to Afghanistan, he had no idea what to actually do there except get a lot of Americans killed while trying to appease the “moderate” Taliban who turned out not to exist despite Qatar’s best efforts to manufacture them.

Since Al Qaeda was a major threat in Iraq (a threat that eventually became ISIS) and Obama needed to disguise his withdrawal from Iraq by blaming Bush for being too weak on national security (a difficult trick for an anti-war lefty), he falsely claimed that Bush had neglected fighting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

There was just one problem, Al Qaeda had largely been broken in Afghanistan and had scattered to other conflicts. There were a handful of Al Qaeda fighters left. There was certainly nothing that required a major troop surge to handle. There was nothing for American soldiers to do there except die.

Read more: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenf...-the-taliban-2/