"... you reference Obama's desire to speed up the deployment and don't mention that the purpose of that may well be to better suit the elections cycle? How the putative beginning of the end of the surge conveniently falls right between the midterm and presidential elections? Your own Robert Haddick has asked in these very pages how does it make sense to plan to begin drawing down troops in the middle of the Taliban's fighting season? It makes sense if your main concern is politics. This whole thing has been orchestrated to suit a political schedule and political imperatives - the plan he has settled on could easily have been settled on months ago - many 'experts' I read fearfully believed and predicted months ago that this is exactly what he'd do, choose some compromised middle ground that would offer the fewest political downsides.
The only logical explanations for the plan and its long gestation period are: that Obama really didn't want to go down this road and had to be dragged here by Gates and Clinton and the Generals and thus the odd time line and bet hedging; or it's all part of a political calculation - Obama knew he couldn't just walk away and so the question became how to do this while incurring the least amount of political damage.
This process and resulting plan were not the result of laudable intellectualism or Rumsfeldian micromanaging: they're either a reflection of fear and doubt or of politics at its most cynical. This attempt by some to recast what has happened here as a noble if not heroic effort by Obama to subdue the Afghan beast by means of his lofty and unyielding intellect is vain and delusional at best, sycophantic at worst..."
