http://www.slate.com/id/2211487/
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2009, at 6:38 PM ET
By Fred Kaplan
President Barack Obama's decision to send 17,000
more troops to Afghanistan means neither that he is "putting his stamp
firmly" on the war, as the New York Times reports, nor that he is
sliding down "the slippery slope of military escalation," as an
anti-war group protests.
He will have to decide where to take the war sometime in the next few
months, and he may wind up on that slope, despite his best efforts to
resist it. But he hasn't yet reached either point.
The president announced on Tuesday that he was sending two more
brigades plus their support personnel to Afghanistan--thus boosting the
U.S. military presence there by half--for two basic reasons: to keep
that country from falling apart before its presidential elections this
August and to provide a modicum of security, so that the elections can
take place.
The White House is conducting a "strategic review" of Afghanistan,
scheduled to be completed in 60 days. (The Pentagon's Joint Staff has
already submitted its own review, and Gen. David Petraeus' U.S. Central
Command is writing one, too. At least one section of the White House's
paper will be a review of those reviews.) After that, Obama will decide
how to deal with this war in the long term. But if he'd waited for the
review before deciding whether to send the two brigades, they wouldn't
have arrived in time for the elections.
In short, whatever Obama eventually does about this war, he pretty much
had to send those two brigades now--a move recommended by all his
civilian and military advisers--unless, of course, he'd decided just to
get out of Afghanistan altogether. But he wasn't going to do that. He
has said many times, during the election campaign and since, that as
U.S. troops pulled out of Iraq, he would send at least some of them to
Afghanistan. And the two brigades that he's sending there now--one
Army, one Marine--were originally scheduled to rotate back into Iraq.
Even so, the president made clear in his announcement that the
deployment is not open-ended. Its purpose, he said, is merely "to
stabilize a deteriorating situation." He also said, more pointedly,
"This troop increase does not pre-determine the outcome of that
strategic review."
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Michael