Obama's Strategic Wasteland
In December 2008, Joe Klein of Time magazine called the war in Afghanistan an "aimless absurdity." Our new president is onboard with committing 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, despite the fact that the Pentagon isn't certain what to tell the additional troops to do there or even what kind of troops it wants to send. According to the Washington Post, "the incoming administration does not anticipate that the Iraq-like 'surge' of forces will significantly change the direction of a conflict that has steadily deteriorated over the past seven years."
One senior U.S. military commander told the Post "We have no strategic plan. We never had one." He was referring to the Bush administration's Afghanistan program, but he might as well have been talking about Iraq and Iran and every other tentacle of Bush era foreign policy. The senior commander also said that Obama's first order of business will be to "explain to the American people what the mission is" in Afghanistan. Obama will be hard pressed to explain what the mission is if he doesn't have a strategy. * more at link
