He hasn't learned anything.
http://tinyurl.com/ol2mrsdFirst came Fallujah, then Mosul and later Ramadi in Iraq. Now, there is Kunduz, a provincial capital in northern Afghanistan. In all four places, the same story has played out: In cities that newspaper reporters like to call “strategically important,” security forces trained and equipped by the US military at great expense simply folded, abandoning their posts (and much of their US-supplied weaponry) without even mounting serious resistance. Called upon to fight, they fled. In each case, the defending forces gave way before substantially outnumbered attackers, making the outcomes all the more ignominious.
Strategically important they say.
Indeed, the United States would be better served if policymakers abandoned the pretense that the Pentagon possesses any gift whatsoever for “standing up” foreign military forces. Prudence might actually counsel that Washington assume instead, when it comes to organizing, training, equipping, and motivating foreign armies, that the United States is essentially clueless.
What are the policy implications of giving up the illusion that the Pentagon knows how to build foreign armies? The largest is this: Subletting war no longer figures as a plausible alternative to waging it directly. So where US interests require that fighting be done, like it or not, we’re going to have to do that fighting ourselves. By extension, in circumstances where US forces are demonstrably incapable of winning or where Americans balk at any further expenditure of American blood — today in the Greater Middle East both of these conditions apply — then perhaps we shouldn’t be there. To pretend otherwise is to throw good money after bad or, as a famous American general once put it, to wage (even if indirectly) “the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.” This we have been doing now for several decades across much of the Islamic world.
In American politics, we await the officeholder or candidate willing to state the obvious and confront its implications.
Neither BHO nor the American public at large has figured out anything. We continue to believe despite all available
evidence, that we can fix what we see as wrong or problematic in other countries by the use of military action.
