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POLITICO reports:
Mitt Romney’s hint in Monday night’s Republican debate that he’s eager to pull the plug on the war in Afghanistan left some of his GOP allies puzzled, Democrats sensing an opportunity, and his staff working to explain what he meant.
“It’s time for us to bring our troops home as soon as we possibly can — as soon as our generals think it’s okay,” Romney said. “One lesson we‘ve learned in Afghanistan is that Americans cannot fight another nation’s war of independence.”
The remark came at a time when American voters are telling pollsters they’re tiring of U.S. interventions in the Muslim world, and as President Barack Obama’s unexpectedly broad military engagement has drawn sharp criticism from some GOP leaders. Other would-be GOP candidates – notably Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour— have flirted with staking out an anti-war, isolationist counterpoint to Obama’s internationalism, but the doubts from Romney surprised some of his allies.
Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said her inbox was flooded Tuesday morning with emails calling Romney’s comments a “disaster.”
“I’d thought of Romney as a mainstream Republican – supporting American strength and American leadership, but this doesn’t reflect that,” she said. “Romney has proven himself a little bit of a weathervane and I guess he senses that positioning himself in this place is good for his campaign — attempting to appease Ron Paul’s constituents without actually being Ron Paul.”
“You can’t really triangulate on these issues. Either you think we’re fighting a war we need to win or you think we ought to bring all the troops home, but he said it all there,” Pletka said.
Other Republicans did not want to be quoted out of party loyalty and fear of the front runner.
This crystallizes better than anything the insanity that rules the GOP. How do you have tax cuts, a balanced budget and an unending commitment to Afghanistan? (And Romney wasn’t even putting a firm date to it; just vague talk with lots of caveats.)
This crystallizes better than anything the insanity that rules the GOP
My first thought, articulated more succinctly than I think I would have.
American voters are telling pollsters they’re tiring of US intervention in the Muslim world. Republicans- the whole freaking lot of them, not just mainstream, right-wing or any other color- have been telling us for years that giving the people what they want according to polls (HC reform and the debt ceiling debate come to mind) is the best way to govern.
With his comments on Afghanistan, it would appear that Romney is voicing a mainstream American view. Perhaps that’s what irks AEI’s email brigade and what caused Pletka to question Romney. I guess We, the People, can be trusted to manage an opinion (and therefore legislative direction) on issues as easy as the debt ceiling (look at the polls, hear what the GOP has said in response) but cannot possible speak out against expensive nation building that has never, ever worked out for us and has stuck our great grandchildren with the bill.
That said, Romney’s statement has holes big enough to drive an elephant through, and hedges his bets. A good piece of campaigning that cannot just be left to stand by the GOPers who have one narrow litmus-test view of American foreign policy.
“Romney has proven himself a little bit of a weathervane” Understatement of the year? The guy has been a weathervane from day one. Lets double the size of Gitmo, but get out of Afghanistan too, that way we will have a lot of empty cells because where the hell are we going to get the prisoners from?
And yes, he is trying to triangulate. He could have said “we are in Afghanistan in order to see that Al Qaeda and the Taliban never have a base of operations with which to attack the US and we will be there as long as it takes.” It has nothing to do with winning Afghanistan’s war of independence (and what the hell did that mean anyhow, independence from whom? The country has been independent for a long time, you can call it a war of liberation from the Taliban…maybe…if anyone the Taliban can say they are fighting a war of independence from the US.)
And centrist is right, this anti-tax yet pro-war element in the Republican party is completely nuts. Thank God Democrats were in charge during WW2, if we had these clowns we would all be speaking German now (though truth to tell a lot of them wouldn’t mind)
This is poor analysis from Politico, like they’re trying to start a GOP cockfight. The idea that Afghanistan is on the back end of the power curve is widely accepted among conservatives in 2011, particularly post-bin Laden. Romney correctly leaves options on the table by deferring to the assessment of military commanders, but on the whole, the south Asia combat effort must be scaled back in lieu of human and financial costs in comparison to the current level of threat to American security.
Much the same way Newt Gingrich effectively articulated the scope of the issue regarding immigration, this issue, of such large international impact and so complex, is not one that lends itself to binary analysis as though the wrong choice (one of only two courses of action) would lead to catastrophic consequences. There is nothing in Mitt Romney’s debate statement that suggest we leave a vacuum of power in Afghanistan. We’re all aware that Iran and Pakistan represent vexing problems, so forward-operating bases and intelligence gathering in the region will continue. Yet those that would believe America has a true responsibility policing the world (or fighting another nation’s war of independence) as a mere principle of American exceptionalism would do themselves some good by reading Bob Gates’ comments to NATO ministers last week. UBL’s head shot was the beginning of the end of the post 9/11 combat mission.
U.S. students (and much of the media) may not understand the concept, but many in the Pentagon still understand well the efficacy of intelligent retreat ala General George Washington.
Caricatures of conservatism may occasionally get caught in the cesspool of party politics. Danielle Pletka apparently has no idea what ‘mainstream’ is in the Republican Party, much less where votes will fall in the primaries. And Ron Paul had one thing right: the Commander-in-Chief makes the call.
Romney has now expressed support of the scientific community consensus on man-made global warming and expressed doubts about keeping massive numbers of troops in the festering mess that is Afghanistan.
As he tries to keep at least one toe on the edge of sanity, will GOP primary voters throw him off the edge of the cliff?
Romney’s POV on Afghanistan is eerily similar to the one I expressed last week…
http://www.frumforum.com/panetta-afghan-gains-reversible#comment-304336
“US resources should be reduced until Afghan military and police fatalities are sustained at a 7:1 ratio when compared to NATO fatalities. Afghanis need to own their war like Iraqis did in 2006 and beyond.
The surge made no sense at the time because not enough Afghanis were ready to fight and die for their own country.”
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Yet another reason to like Romney…
Honestly, an open-palmed question to this:
The surge made no sense at the time because not enough Afghanis were ready to fight and die for their own country.”
I would agree with the sentiment- a country has to be organically ready from the inside to handle a revolution. But hasn’t that been the downfall of the United States’ entire approach to nation building in the Middle East? After all, Iraqis were no more ready to fight and die for nor organize and run their own country.
Isn’t that one thing the difference between Iraq- a continued mess- and Egypt- still struggling but emerging as self-determining?
I don’t think you will find a single military or civilian expert that would indicate that the citizenry and the civil and military infrastructure of Afghanistan today is anywhere close to the civility and capability of selfpolicing that Iraq enjoyed in 2006 before the surge started. Not one!
Iraqis were self-governing in many of their provinces before the surge started there. The Iraqi troops were in the lead in many of the confrontations of the surge.
From 2006 on, Iraqi police and military were taking the preponderance of causalities, not the Americans.
Today, the “nation” of Afghanistan is not much more than the city of Kabul. Most of the Afghanis believe in culture out ot the middle ages. The Iraqis had history of modern government agencies, education, understanding of a professional army.
Those comparing Afghanistan to Iraq as equivalent are being dishonest or totally ignorant…And again, I have not heard a single expert make a comparison that did not show Iraq as a much easier war of insurgency to win.
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Here is what I wrote 16 months ago…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/community/groups/index.html?plckForumPage=ForumDiscussion&plckDiscussionId=Cat:a70e3396-6663-4a8d-ba19-e44939d3c44fForum:1d815998-efbb-465a-8a40-74441676780fDiscussion:f3fd80a4-f43f-4009-ba1e-0b31bce60264&plckCurrentPage=437
Now that it seems that Iraq is on a bumpy glide path to being a democratic republic, it will be interesting to imagine how historians will remember it.
Politically, the Iraq war created plenty of energy in the Democratic party to try to circumvent what Bush was trying to finish in Iraq. The Democrats did not believe that a combination of military and civilian help from the US could actually stabilize Iraq. Some even still view that it was only us leaving that led to stabilization in Iraq. (And amazingly, some of these same people support the surge in Afghanistan).
Afghanistan is actually more like Vietnam than Iraq ever was. In what is an amazing demonstration of political bias, the main stream media ignores the loss of American life in Afghanistan seemingly because a Democrat is in the White House. There has not been a single expose as to how Iraq was so much easier to win than Afghanistan will be.
The American public deserve to be told the truth. The Democrats love to say that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld painted a rosy picture of Iraq. The picture painted of Afghanistan by the Democrats is biased even rosier than the evil Republicans ever did.
The real truth is that the Afghanistan military is still at least 5 to 10 years behind where the Iraqi military is today. Unlike in Iraq, there is no real sense of nationalism for most Afghans.
I am just wondering what the text books will say in a decade when Afghanistan is still not won and Iraq has emerged as a real power in the Middle East.
Did the Democrats bet on the unwinnable war?