Posted by BrianinMO
Friday, October 2, 2009
Via Freedom’s Lighthouse:
Here is video of Retired Col. Jack Jacobs – an MSNBC Military Analyst – telling Ed Schultz he believes President Obama’s meeting with top U.S. Commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, was the direct result of McChrystal’s comments yeserday in London that were critical of Vice-President Joe Biden’s strategy of “leaving Afghanistan to the Taliban.” Jacobs believes McChrystal was “summoned” to Copenhagen by Obama because of those comments.
Here is a report on his comments that contradicted what Biden has called for:
The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, used a speech here Thursday to reject calls for the war effort to be scaled down from defeating the Taliban insurgency to a narrower focus on hunting down al Qaeda, an option suggested by Vice President Joe Biden as part of the current White House strategy review.
After his first 100 days in command in Kabul, McChrystal chose a blue-ribbon audience at London’s Institute for Strategic Studies as a platform for a public airing of the confidential assessment of the war he delivered to the Pentagon last month, parts of which were leaked to news organizations.
McChrystal, 55, did not mention Biden or his advocacy of a scaled-down war effort during his London speech, and referred only obliquely to the debate within the Obama administration on whether to escalate the American commitment in Afghanistan by accepting his request for up to 40,000 more American troops on top of the 68,000 already deployed there or en route.
But he used the London session for a frank rebuttal of the idea of a more narrowly focused war. When a questioner asked him whether he would support scaling back the American military presence over the next 18 months by relinquishing the battle with the Taliban and focusing on tracking down al Qaeda, sparing ground troops by hunting al Qaeda extremists and their leaders with missiles from unmanned drones, he replied: “The short answer is: no.”
“You have to navigate from where you are, not from where you wish to be,” he said. “A strategy that does not leave Afghanistan in a stable position is probably a shortsighted strategy.” . . . MORE
Jacobs believes Obama is likely to try and “split the baby” by giving McChrystal some additional forces, but with lots of strings attached and a timetable for results. He does not believe Obama will give McChrystal all he has asked for, and says it is possible the General will resign if Obama refuses to provide the reinforcements requested.
