By Herman Cain ——Bio and Archives--June 20, 2016
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President Barack Obama has approved giving the U.S. military greater ability to accompany and enable Afghan forces battling a resilient Taliban insurgency, in a move to assist them more proactively on the battlefield, a U.S. official told Reuters. The senior U.S. defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the decision would also allow greater use of U.S. air power, particularly close air support. However, the official cautioned: "This is not a blanket order to target the Taliban."
Obama's decision again redefines America's support role in Afghanistan's grinding conflict, more than a year after international forces wrapped up their combat mission and shifted the burden to Afghan troops. It also comes ahead of Obama's eagerly anticipated decision on whether to forge ahead with a scheduled reduction in the numbers of U.S. troops from about 9,800 currently to 5,500 by the start of 2017. A group of retired generals and senior diplomats urged Obama last week to forgo those plans, warning they could undermine the fight against the Afghan Taliban, whose leader was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan last month.So we can "accompany and enable," but it's not a "blanket order to target the Taliban." Does anyone know what that means? And why does it take a bunch of "retired generals and senior diplomats" to explain to Obama that if you cut the number of deployed troops almost in half, it will make it less likely that we succeed. Whatever success even means anymore in this war. We don't seem to have the will or a way to wipe out the Taliban completely, probably because the Taliban is as much an idea and a movement as it is a group of people. I'm not saying there's no value to killing them, and I'm certainly not buying the trite liberal nonsense that says every time you kill a terrorist, you just create 30 more. I'm simply saying that if you fight a war you should know how you're going to win it. Beyond the initial step of ousting the Taliban from power, I don't think the Bush Administration quite knew how it was going to win this thing either, as evidenced by the fact that the war dragged on throughout Bush's presidency. For all the criticism of the Iraq War and how badly it was supposedly going, the 2007 surge delivered a decisive victory. If not for Obama's politically driven withdrawal in 2011, Iraq would be stable today.
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