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August 18, 2009

Afghanistan Mission Creep Watch - The President Confirms It Version
Posted by Michael Cohen

President Barack Obama on March 27th, 2009:

So I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal:  to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future.

President Barack Obama today at the VFW in Phoenix:

And our new strategy has a clear mission and defined goals: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its extremist allies.

So back on March 27th, our goal was to disrupt, defeat and dismantle Al Qaeda. Fast forward nearly 5 months and now we're going to throw AQ's extremist allies into the mix.  I suppose on one level I should be pleased about this; the President has pretty much confirmed what I've been saying for about two months now - that a mission predicated on targeting Al Qaeda has expanded to included its "extremist allies." Oh and by the way, who exactly are these extremist allies, Mr. President. Just the Afghanistan Taliban or the Pakistan Taliban too?

I've been saying for a while now that the lack of transparency from the Obama Administration on US policy toward Afghanistan is disturbing.  The shift from counter terrorism to full-fledged counter-insurgency was the first step. Last week we had Ambassador Richard Holbrooke unable to even define what success looks like. And now we have the President saying 'oh, by the way, remember how I said the mission was disrupting, dismantling and defeating Al Qaeda? Well we're going to expand that a bit.'

If the President believes that the US needs to ramp up the mission in Afghanistan to include defeating, dismantling and disrupting the Taliban and other extremist allies of Al Qaeda that's fine, but he needs to explain it to the American people. But to sneak a fairly significant and explicit expansion of that mission into a speech in the middle of August at the VFW . . . well quite frankly, that's not change I can believe in.

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