Afghanistan: The Biden Solution?

Increasingly, there are rumblings that Obama is considering implementing a Joe Biden plan for the war in Afghanistan; rather than take the advice of his appointed general overseeing that war. In essence, the Biden plan says we should conduct a protracted war in Afghanistan with limited troop support and concentrate on attacking Al Qaeda with remote-controlled drones by targeting their strongholds all along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. At the heart of this plan is the belief that we don't need to worry about the Taliban; as if, somehow, these just-radical-as-Al-Qaeda radicals pose no threat to America.

Apparently, people like Biden seem to forget that we wouldn't have even attacked Afghanistan if the ruling Taliban had simply turned over Bin Laden in the first place. But, they protected Bin Laden and the rest of Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda training camps and refused to give them up. This, then, resulted in the war that we have today. A war that has chased both the Taliban and Al Qaeda into the mountainous areas of Tora Bora. To back off now would just hand Afghanistan back over to the Taliban and, then, most likely, reestablish home sweet home for Al Qaeda.

If Biden had been such a spot-on military strategist in the past, I would say that we should consider his plan. However, he has been consistently out of step with both logic and reality. He was against the original Gulf War because he didn't think we could take Saddam's army. But, to the contrary, we defeated Saddam in just days.

Then, he was all "for" the second war with Iraq because he firmly believed that Saddam had those weapons of mass destruction. The left seems to forget that Biden was wrong, too, while they keep blaming Bush for the "lie" that Saddam had WMD's. Since then, Biden went on record saying that the surge wouldn't work. But, unfortunately for Biden's continuing reputation of being wrong, the surge did work and worked better than expected. Then there was his brilliant plan that the war in Iraq could be ended by just partitioning Iraq into three religious areas that were controlled by the Sunnis, Shiites, and the Kurds. Of course, instrumental to this insane idea was the fact that Sunnis, Kurds and Shia who were living in someone else's territory would have to be uprooted from their homes and moved to be with those of their own kind. Thank God Biden didn't have any input on desegregation plans of the 1960's in this country. Otherwise, all the Blacks of America would have wound up being cloistered in some isolated city/states in America.

The left has a history of not trusting the military and in believing that the military is only interested in war and more war. Because of this, the left has always believed that it is the military's own self interest to always want more troops. But, in reality, Generals, like anyone else, don't really want to go to war unless they can win without sustaining massive losses of either men or material. Also, most Generals believe that a strong military is a deterrent to war and not a reason to go to war; at least if the military is part of a peaceful society like ours.

Personally, I wouldn't bet on anything that Biden says. He is literally a gaffe-a-minute machine. This fact, alone, should give one pause to consider anything he says. To listen to him on Afghanistan is to ignore that fact and to ignore how terribly wrong he has been in the past. Yet, this President and the left of his party seem to think that Biden is the be-all and end-all when it comes to military planning. God help us all!