The Redhunter

An excerpt:

Senior White House advisers are frustrated by what they say is the Pentagon's slow pace in deploying 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan and its inability to live up to an initial promise to have all of the forces in the country by next summer, senior administration officials said Friday.

Tensions over the deployment schedule have been growing in recent weeks between senior White House officials -- among them Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Gen. James L. Jones, the national security adviser, and Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff -- and top commanders, including Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the senior commander in Afghanistan.

A rapid deployment is central to President Obama's strategy, to have a jolt of American forces pound the Taliban enough for Afghan security forces to take over the fight. Administration officials said that part of the White House frustration stemmed from the view that the longer the American military presence in Afghanistan continued, the more of a political liability it would become for Mr. Obama. But beyond the politics, the speeded up deployment -- which Mr. Obama paired with a promise to begin troop withdrawals by July 2011 -- is part of Mr. Obama's so-called "bell curve" Afghanistan strategy, whereby American troops would increase their force in Afghanistan and step up attacks meant to quickly take out insurgents.

One administration official said that the White House believed that top Pentagon and military officials misled them by promising to deploy the 30,000 additional troops by the summer. General McChrystal and some of his top aides have privately expressed anger at that accusation, saying that they are being held responsible for a pace of deployments they never thought was realistic, the official said....

I hope this is news hype, or the result of a disgruntled staffer at either the White House or Pentagon feeding misleading information to a reporter. I hope that's the case because the alternative is that the Obama Administration doesn't care about winning and is looking to blame the military if things don't go as they want.

More, and again assuming the story has legs, it's clear that the first priority of the administration is not to win but a distraction that they'd just as soon get out of the way so they can get on with their main goal of pushing the country in the direction of European-style socialism.

Yes, let's push to get the troops there as fast as possible. But anyone who thinks the situation easy should read my post Supply Lines to Afghanistan, which I think is a good primer on the subject, or Afghanistan Briefing - 06 March 2009 - Building An Alternative to the Khyber Pass for a discussion on how we are trying to improve the situation.

But there's always that Clausewitzian friction, a concept totally lost on Obama and the liberals in his administration. A more current term would be Murphy's Law, which I don't need a link to explain.

Either way, Obama and his liberals need to understand that this will take time, and instead of pointing fingers, our president needs to use his formidable oratorical skills to sell and resell the case for fighting and winning in Afghanistan to the American people. Or course, that presumes that he actually wants to win it, and that his campaign rhetoric was not just a bunch of hot air to get himself elected. Kind of, you know, like that campaign promise to conduct healthcare negotiations on TV that he hasn't quite kept.