When the former speaker of the House visits Iowa, it is news. When the former speaker of the House visits Iowa and then says that the War in Afghanistan “isn’t going to end well,” that is bigger news.
The Des Moines Register reports that Congressman Newt Gingrich told a group of reporters that the war in Afghanistan “isn’t going to end well.” He elaborated: “We are in enormous danger because we consistently underestimate how hard this is” and added that David Petraeus’ counter-insurgency doctrine “doesn’t go deep enough for some place like Afghanistan… You’re dealing with Afghan culture that is fundamentally different than us, in ways we don’t understand… The war ‘is not going to end well.”
The comments were made while Congressman Gingrich was speaking about Michael Steele’s comments about the war. Steele asserted at a fundraiser that the war in Afghanistan was a “war of Obama’s choosing” and “is not something that the United States has actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in.”
It must be noted that Gingrich is openly considering a run at the presidency. He is now the second major Republican figure to suggest that the War in Afghanistan may not be wise…
Follow Jeb Golinkin on Twitter: @Jgolinkin
DFL // Jul 14, 2010 at 12:43 pm
No, he’s starting to make sense. Afghanistan is an expensive fool’s errand not worth one drop of American blood.
westony // Jul 14, 2010 at 1:12 pm
Newt will jump on any Republican talking points. And apparenlty any woman under 24 as well.
Watusie // Jul 14, 2010 at 1:34 pm
Newt has one hell of a problem with his presidential campaign: he was a hawk on Bush’s folly in Iraq, both participating thin the “planning” (if you can call it that) as well as publicly agitating for it. Exhibit A: this column he wrote in 2002: http://www.aei.org/article/14365
Of course, when things went bad he started flip-flopping like a bass in the bottom of a boat.
So now he has to find some obfuscations to hide behind, so he is going with the Rovian jujitsu.
LFC // Jul 14, 2010 at 3:06 pm
Of course, when things went bad he started flip-flopping like a bass in the bottom of a boat.
Repeat after me. Being Republican means never having to take responsibility for anything you ever said or did.
Compare Gingrich’s quote from the link Watusie provide to the reality they were hiding from us:
You can practically see the piss running down his leg.
jakester // Jul 14, 2010 at 3:17 pm
Will some one tell me what the goals of the war are, either Obama’s or some hawks?
LFC // Jul 14, 2010 at 3:36 pm
You know the thing that drives me nuts about Gingrich? The guy is smart, probably as smart as Romney. I truly believe he and Romney both have the ability to be strong and sane conservatives, if they simply chose to be.
Now maybe it’s just impossible to get the POTUS nomination as a Republican if you’re smart and sane, but dammit these guys could have serious potential if the party was more like it was under Reagan and George HW. Instead we get nitwits like George W., Mike Huckabee, John McCain, and Sarah Palin. Talk about the C-list!
Being smart may not be a good predictor of being a good President (i.e. Jimmy Carter was smart but was a horrible President), but being a know-nothing is a guarantee of being a bad one.
LFC // Jul 14, 2010 at 3:43 pm
Will some one tell me what the goals of the war are, either Obama’s or some hawks?
Jakester, I believe it is simply to prop up the gov’t enough that they can control a fairly major portion of the country. I believe it is also to have them friendly to us so that if the Taliban once again supports the likes of AQ, they’ll allow us to use their airspace to blow them to kingdom come.
I think these are good goals BUT they depend upon the gov’t being competent enough to actually take responsibility for the areas they control. The more I see, the less faith I have that this pre-condition can be met by the Karzai government. (We also blew one s**t-pot-full of political capital by letting Afghanistan dangle for 7 years after we got involved. Running off to Iraq was a military blunder of monumental proportions.)
And although I think Gingrich and Steele are simply being political opportunists, that doesn’t mean I necessarily disagree with them. We need to see if the Afghan gov’t can step up to the plate. If they can’t, then it will be time to go. It’s impossible to build a competent gov’t from incompetent and corrupt people. The big question is, of course, when do we give up on them?
Watusie // Jul 14, 2010 at 3:46 pm
To kill the people who were responsible for 9/11.
CO Independent // Jul 14, 2010 at 4:26 pm
@Watusi & LFC:
Neither of your posts make any sense. Yes, Gingrich was an Iraq hawk. This article is about Afghanistan, not Iraq.
For better or worse, the Bush administration policy was to engage AQ in Iraq, not in Afghanistan. The Bush administration deliberately kept a small military footprint in Afghanistan. Bush’s Iraq surge appears to have been successful, or at least as successful as a limited war can be. It is notable that the Bush administration did not attempt a similar surge in Afghanistan.
Obama initiated this Afghanistan surge. He owns it. It is entirely appropriate for Republicans to question this strategy.
TAZ // Jul 14, 2010 at 4:35 pm
“You know the thing that drives me nuts about Gingrich? The guy is smart, probably as smart as Romney. I truly believe he and Romney both have the ability to be strong and sane conservatives, if they simply chose to be.”
I 100% agree.
I loved Newt.
What Newt has become is no more than a pander machine these days.
On the subject of Romney….. you have not seen him poke his head up lately have you? If he can continue to duck the spotlight for the next year or so he will look like the only remaining sane member of the Republican party and win the primary by default.
Smart move Romney.
TerryF98 // Jul 14, 2010 at 4:37 pm
@Co Independent.
There were no AQ in Iraq when Sadam was in charge. We tried to get false confessions by torture to prove otherwise but to no avail.
AQ moved into Iraq in order to attack our occupation of that country. Bush just dropped the ball in Afghanistan. Why do you try to revise history, is it so hard to admit Bush screwed up?
Watusie // Jul 14, 2010 at 4:38 pm
CO Independent – I repeat: Rovian jujitsu. Gingrich’s rich fantasy life includes squaring up against Obama in 2012. But he has a huge problem – in 2002 he was exactly wrong and Obama was exactly right about the necessity for and likely course of the war in Iraq. So, he has to plan now for a response. I’m guessing that he is going to stake out a position as as close as he can get to 180 degrees away from Obama’s Afghanistan policy. Not because he actually believes in that position, but because he finds it politically expedient to do so. Then, when people say “you are a numpty on foreign policy, look at what you said about Iraq”, he’ll just brush past that and blather on about his genius insight into Afghanistan.
The rest of your comment is just bizarre. How could the Bush administration engage Aq in Iraq, not in Afghanistan, when AQ was in Afghanistan, not Iraq?
Watusie // Jul 14, 2010 at 4:42 pm
Taz:
He made a huge ass of himself just last week with a massively stupid and factually erroneous editorial condemning the new START Treaty in the WaPo just last week.
Oldskool // Jul 14, 2010 at 4:46 pm
That’s crazy talk. Iraq was about many nonsensical things but chasing al-queada wasn’t one of them. I’m talking about reality. As a matter of talking points, sure; 911, wmd, they were going to nuke us, yellowcake, aluminum cylinders, mobile something-or-another weapons, etc.
Matter of fact, if we had not invaded Iraq, Afghanistan would likely be over and done with. We had everything going for us when the Bush genuises moved on to greener pastures.
DFL // Jul 14, 2010 at 4:55 pm
Iraq was about George Bush’s messianic mission to force democracy and the American Way on the Middle East no matter whether those people wanted it or not. He was Nathan Scharansky with an adopted Texas twang and a caricature of Texas mannerisms.
easton // Jul 14, 2010 at 5:33 pm
When the former speaker of the House visits Iowa, it is news
Why? What is Dennis Hastert doing, does anyone care? Gingrich was Speaker for a pathetically short period of 4 years, Hastert for 8. Tom Foley was speaker for nearly 6, why is there not news about what he says? Gingrich only gets exposure because he keeps pretending he will run for President, but he never will.
Olkskool, damn right. The Bush’s administration of the war in Afghanistan was downright obscene, borderline treasonous. Imagine after Pearl Harbor we made some half hearted effort to confront the axis, but instead invaded Argentina. This myth of Afghan invincibility these Republicans believe in is crackpot. We let Osama waltz out of Afghanistan because Rumsfeld wanted to show how to win a war without soldiers. Rumsfeld then proceeded to royally screw up Iraq, only after the Democrats took Congress that Bush finally faced reality and dumped that pathetic egoist and brought in professionals.
As to Afghanistan, LFC is right, we don’t need to rebuild the country or turn it into Switzerland, we need only prevent the Taliban and Al Qaeda from retaking the country. Lets not forget the Pashtun Taliban represent only a small portion of the population, the remaining minorities are not part of that group. Most of the fighting and dying we endure is in the Pashtun south. I wish we would risk arming the other minorities, but I understand the reluctance of Generals to have armies not under their own control.
Watusie // Jul 14, 2010 at 5:51 pm
I’m not buying this stuff about Newt being a massive intellect. He stikes me as being more of a personaltiy-disorder sort of think – like autism, but for politics. Check out this from the NYT Magazine profile last year:
Got that? A man so out of step with normality that he is pestering colleagues with nonsense on Christmas Day.
Not pretty.
BoolaBoola // Jul 15, 2010 at 2:39 am
Newt’s problem is he looks and talks like a Ferengi on Star Trek TNG. Half rat, half toad.
balconesfault // Jul 15, 2010 at 4:10 am
I unfortunately agree that Afghanistan “won’t end well” … but I believe it’s because of overreach in our first principles.
The Taliban didn’t take power in Afghanistan because they were some evil cabal intent on building a power base to export global Islamic revolution. They took power because nobody else in the country really cared, and the system of local warlord control was so corrupt that those who did care actually welcomed some centralized legal system to protect them from the warlords.
Up until the moment Al Qaeda flew planes into US buildings, the Taliban’s most prominent conflict was their civil war with the Northern Alliance, which was formed not because the local warlords were against imposition of Sharia law, but because they were opposed to any law trumping their own local power.
For the most part, it seems that the Taliban allowed Al Qaeda to operate freely not because they shared Al Qaeda’s desire to bring down America … but because Al Qaeda served as their henchmen when they needed dirty work done against rebelling warlords, and because Bin Laden had the connections to get money flowing from the Arab world into Afghanistan, which was becoming significantly poorer after the Taliban had banned poppy production.
Crushing the Taliban, as we did in 2002, was a necessary response to the 9/11 attacks – but it has always been folly to think we could nation build our way into Afghanistan not harboring terrorists once again. The way to keep Afghanistan from harboring terrorists was to let the Taliban know it was in their best interests to not allow terrorists to operate there anymore, a message we effectively established in a few months of our invasion. But it was almost inevitable that if we kept pumping billions of dollars into some new government while sending in our troops to protect it, we were most likely going to cultivate a government of corruption.
I know it’s nice if there are schools for women and elections and a liberal western view of pluralism. But the Afghan people are going to have to decide that they really want that, and are willing to fight for it. Meanwhile, imo the longer our Humvees and tanks roll up and down Afghan streets, and our helicopters and fighters and drones patrol Afghan skies, the more we feed the kind of nationalism that will have people turning to the Taliban as a primary tool for driving us out of their country.
DFL // Jul 15, 2010 at 9:36 am
balconesfault, that was an excellent post.
easton // Jul 15, 2010 at 12:38 pm
“They took power because nobody else in the country really cared” I don’t think that is true. The Taliban are primarily Pashtun and they were funded, armed, and trained by Pakistan. They also never did subdue the entire country, with the Northern Alliance holding onto a small portion, they were also never recognized by any other country besides Pakistan. The ISI and Pakistan was intimately involved with the Taliban leadership for years (and still are).
I think the best chance to win the war is to crush the Pashtuns dream of dominating the country politically, the best way to do this is to arm and train the other ethnic minorities. It will probably cause a civil war, but it is a civil war our preferred side can win.
busboy33 // Jul 15, 2010 at 6:24 pm
“Gingrich: Afghanistan ‘Won’t End Well’ ”
See, I was confused before. I thought invading Afganistan, especially deciding halfway thru to also invade Iraq simultaneous, would be a glorious patriotic cakewalk. He must have found something new and explosive out . . . because otherwise he’d have been complaining about this from the get-go, right? Since any person over the age of 10 could have guessed this answer.
How did Gingritch pry this super-classified information loose from the Obama Administration? Good show, old bean! What finally clued you in?
snxster // Jul 21, 2010 at 4:41 am
I’m appalled that anyone that calls themselves conservatives can even contemplate voting for someone as morally and ethically corrupt as Newt Gingrich. This guy is a Republican in Name Only and he is in no way a Reagan Republican. Gingrich voted FOR the Department of Education, FOR NAFTA and GATT. Hell, we’re in Bill Clinton’s NAFTA and GATT because of all of Newt Gingrich’s pushing of the bill in Congress. Gingrich is just a pandering buffoon who will say anything to get elected. Hell, read this article. It outlines Gingrich’s bullshit policies:
http://www.unelected.org/2010/07/21/socialist-of-the-week-newt-gingrich/