De-Nile is Not Just a River in Egypt Posted by Michael Cohen

While the world's eyes are fixated on the pro-democracy demonstrations in Egypt there is, under the radar screen, even more evidence of the strategic dysfunction and delusion that resides at the heart of US policy in Afghanistan. In a press briefing at the Pentagon yesterday, Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, the number two military commander Afghanistan, said those safe havens in Pakistan . . . not really a big deal.

Rodriguez said Tuesday that the United States and NATO could succeed in the war even if Pakistan refused to shut down a lawless frontier sanctuary that militants use for staging attacks on forces across the border in Afghanistan.

In comments that sought to make a virtue of a now-acknowledged reality, General Rodriguez, the NATO and American commander in charge of the day-to-day fighting in Afghanistan, said that while the United States continued to press Pakistan to root out the militants from their haven in the northwest tribal region of North Waziristan, the United States could still win militarily if the Pakistani Army did not act.

“That’s not a mission-stopper in my mind,” General Rodriguez told reporters at a Pentagon briefing. He did not provide a definition of winning militarily.

As the New York Times notes Rodriguez's view of the Pakistani safe havens is at direct odds with public comments from head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen, the White House, pretty much the entire intelligence community and any serious (or not serious) counter-insurgency analyst. The notion that suddenly the US military can 'work-around' a problem that nearly all analysts, both inside and outside of government, consider to be an existential threat to the success of the US mission seems incomprehensible. Indeed, back in December the US military was pushing the Obama Administration for the extreme step of allowing cross-border raids into Pakistan (a US ally) to go after Taliban insurgents. 

So why is Rodriguez making a comment like this - because to acknowledge that the existence of Pakistani safe havens is a mission stopper would be to acknowledge that the current strategy in Afghanistan isn't working and even more important is unlikely to succeed. 

But instead of doing that the mindset of our political and military leaders seems to be - not surprisingly - how do we work around this problem, rather than reconcile military strategy with it. This is military "can-doism" run horribly amok. But there's no good reason for anyone else to take it seriously.

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This is why it's so important to elect a president who has the spine to rein in his military commanders. If every president simply follows the advice of the his generals, the United States will always be at war.

It's no surprise that our military leaders still believe they can "win," even if they don't have a definition of what that entails. But the nation needs a leader who is capable of strategizing at a level beyond that of his generals, perhaps even going against their advice.

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