Success Hinges on Strength of Afghan Leader
By GERALD F. SEIB
WSJ
President Barack Obama's new Afghanistan strategy represents a significant gamble, the success of which will turn on two key assumptions about the main characters in the Afghan drama:
The first assumption is that President Hamid Karzai can be made stronger than is often supposed. The second is that the Taliban enemy is weaker than is often imagined.
President Obama addresses cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., and outlines his new strategy for the war in Afghanistan. WSJ's Alan Murray and Jerry Seib join the News Hub and tell Kelsey Hubbard what's at stake.
Both propositions underlie Mr. Obama's calculation that a surge of 30,000 new American troops can be both mounted quickly and ended quickly. The most controversial part of that strategy is Mr. Obama's decision to set a two-year timetable for pulling out those additional American troops he is sending to Afghanistan.
The American military has long resisted hard and public timetables for ending military missions, on the assumption that a deadline merely lets the bad guys know how long they have to wait out American troops before moving in. That precise criticism was immediately heard from Republicans.
(More here.)
WSJ
President Barack Obama's new Afghanistan strategy represents a significant gamble, the success of which will turn on two key assumptions about the main characters in the Afghan drama:
The first assumption is that President Hamid Karzai can be made stronger than is often supposed. The second is that the Taliban enemy is weaker than is often imagined.
President Obama addresses cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., and outlines his new strategy for the war in Afghanistan. WSJ's Alan Murray and Jerry Seib join the News Hub and tell Kelsey Hubbard what's at stake.
Both propositions underlie Mr. Obama's calculation that a surge of 30,000 new American troops can be both mounted quickly and ended quickly. The most controversial part of that strategy is Mr. Obama's decision to set a two-year timetable for pulling out those additional American troops he is sending to Afghanistan.
The American military has long resisted hard and public timetables for ending military missions, on the assumption that a deadline merely lets the bad guys know how long they have to wait out American troops before moving in. That precise criticism was immediately heard from Republicans.
(More here.)
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