Bob Herbert’s polemic NYT’s commentary ‘The Hard Bitter Truth’  staring at President Obama“and it’s not blinking” advises the President not to continue the war in Afghanistan. With all of the proposed strategies pointing to defeat short of total occupation of the country. He quotes John McCain, who wrote about the immorality of sending US soldiers to fight an mission less war. Afghanistan is an undisputed quagmire and Obama’s his best intentions will not change the realities of that country.  His efforts to refocus the ‘forgotten’ real 9/11 war, has been too little, too late.

We are being beaten day by playing into the hands of an unrecognizable enemy. The fantasies of democratizing and stabilizing the region need to be dropped since we are in desperate need to define our enemy…again. The first rule of war.   Besides, so much of what drives Afghanistan is the international poppy trade.   An international unknown conglomerate with political tentacles everywhere, certainly infiltrating the region as much as oil politics.

Fortunately as depressing as all of the news from Afghanistan has been, it has been encouraging that Obama has indicated that he is formulating new strategies that acknowledge that things have changed. On the front page of the Times tonight “a plan advocated by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to scale back American forces and focus more on rooting out Al Qaeda there and in Pakistan.”  Less troop infusion and more surgical strikes using advanced technology, intelligence gathering and leveraging multinational networks of anti-terrorism.

Actually the most persuasive argument that the President needs to change his mission in Iraq– The Republican leadership wants to continue the war.