by Joe Galloway

President Barack Obama has made no decision yet on where we are going and what we are doing in Afghanistan but if the flood of leaks this week is any indicator he has, at least, decided what he is not going to do.

He is not going to be rushed into making so important a decision.

He is seemingly unwilling to buy a pig in a poke from any of the players -- not from Gen. Stanley McChrystal who wants a new installment of 45,000 to 60,000 more American troops and not from his own national security wizards who have proffered four different pigs in four different pokes.

The word is that none of the various alternatives contained what the president wanted to see -- an estimate of how many years more would be needed beyond the eight already invested and an exit strategy.

Bravo!

Simple question and a vital requirement: How much longer and how do we get out when that time is up?

Let's call that Military Planning 101 and, like the president, we are left to ponder why that basic first step in committing a nation and its military and its treasury to a war wasn't taken before now and was missing from all the alternatives offered at this critical junction eight long years into a war?

The previous president's strategy was simple: Stay the course.

What Gen. McChrystal and his Pentagon overlords wanted was a blank check for Afghanistan. They wanted an open-ended commitment in terms of years, troops and money.

The military request on the table, if rubber-stamped as they had hoped, would bring the number of American troops from today's 70,000 to well in excess of 100,000. What experience teaches is that they would be back again next spring or summer asking for an additional 50,000 or 75,000. And again next fall.

When is the last time you heard a military commander ask for fewer troops and less money?

So this president is due a polite round of applause for not letting the generals stampede him into a swift, decisive and totally wrong decision to give them what they want.

I am assuming that the four alternative Afghanistan war plans generated in a month's worth of internal conferences by the president's own experts were all, to one extent or another, political compromises. Paring the cheese into slices of different thicknesses. Buying time by giving Gen. McChrystal half a loaf, or a third.

In the middle of all this to'ing and fro'ing up pops the U.S. ambassador to Kabul, retired Army Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, a former commander in Afghanistan himself, advising the president he should not send even one more American soldier unless and until the kleptocracy of President Hamid Karzai cleans up its act.

Shock and horror. This general has the temerity to suggest that Karzai and his gang should stop stealing millions from the stream of U.S. aid money intended to help his suffering people; that their ranks be purged of drug lords like Karzai's brother; that their army and police behave better than packs of jackals looting villagers by day and hiding from the Taliban guerrillas by night.

Now we are getting somewhere. The president wants to know how long, how much and how do we get out. The ambassador wants our putative ally, the government we are sending American troops out to die defending, to become something more than Hamid Baba's 40 Thieves, something more than a recruiting tool for the enemy. He demands that the Afghan government become something worth defending.

A series of American presidents never asked those questions, never demanded honesty and faithful service of corrupt dictators in South Vietnam, and the consequences are writ large in the pages of our history: 58,260 American troops killed, more than 300,000 wounded, 3 million troops sent to serve, billions of dollars simply poured down a rat hole.

So by all means, Mr. President, hold your wise men's and your generals' feet to the fire before you invest one more life, one more dollar defending a totally corrupt government and a people who increasingly see us as a bigger threat -- a more dangerous enemy -- than the Taliban guerrillas.

Take all the time you need. Stay the course until they answer your questions and Mr. Karzai starts filling his prisons with his ministers and warlords and, yes, his own family.

It's about time.

 

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