More Conservative Praise For Obama's Plan on Afghanistan

I am bullish on it too.

Krauthammer’s Take [NRO Staff]
From Friday’s “All Stars.”

On Obama’s new Afghan policy:

Well, I thought if you take away the few gratuitous, and I thought cheap attacks on Bush and his policies, I thought it was a reasonably good plan, one that you could imagine the Bush administration have instituted, and certainly John McCain having adopted had he been elected.

And it is essentially an Afghan surge, although you can't use the word because it refers to Iraq, which we're not supposed to speak about in this new era of Obama.

The other thing it does is it learns the lessons of Iraq about a new strategy of counterinsurgency, namely, instead of search and destroy, which doesn't work, you flood the zone and you protect populations. And that's what we're going to do in the east and the south, where you have had a resurgence of the Taliban.

So I think all of that is good.

The one area where I think they are a little bit weak, this notion that we're going to affect the course of Pakistan with a billion and a half in aid. If you do the math, this is the sixth most populous country on earth. That amounts to $9 a year per person. You could purchase one left shoe with that if you are a Pakistani.

We are not going to have any effect on the course of the economy and the social development of a country of that size. All that we can do and what I would use the billion and a half, is to direct the assistance to the Pakistani military, because that's the future of the country and our main ally in the fight with Al Qaeda.
03/30 10:01 AMShare