Endgame? What Endgame?
Afghanistan: A war without end

by Justin Raimondo
by Justin Raimondo

So, you thought it was all going to be different, did you, that we were in for a change – a Big Change? Well, the bad news, as Newsweek reports, is that the more things change …. 

"The Pentagon is prepared to announce the deployment of 17,000 additional soldiers and Marines to Afghanistan as early as this week even as President Barack Obama is searching for his own strategy for the war. According to military officials during last week's meeting with Defense Secretary Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon's 'tank,' the president specifically asked, 'What is the end game?' in the U.S. military's strategy for Afghanistan. When asked what the answer was, one military official told NBC News, 'Frankly, we don't have one.' But they're working on it."

He's searching for strategy – at this late date? Isn't this the same Barack Hussein Obama who told us Bush was neglecting the Afghan front, and that we had to redirect our efforts away from Iraq in order to invest more troops and treasure in Afghanistan, doing whatever it is we're supposed to be doing there? Surely he had some kind of plan in mind.

And, by the way, what are we doing there? Frankly, nobody knows – least of all, apparently, President Obama. His generals are equally clueless. Maybe they ought to ask the outgoing President – Dick Cheney, I mean. After all, this war was launched by the Cheney-Bush administration, and the neocons who talked us into this clearly had something very specific in mind – now what was it?  

Oh yeah, now I remember: they were going to "transform" the entire region by first smashing Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, and then crushing Saddam Hussein: this was supposed to spark a general uprising extending from North Africa to the wilds of Waziristan, and usher in a new era of capital-'D' Democracy. 

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February 7, 2009

Justin Raimondo [send him mail] is editorial director of Antiwar.com and is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.

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