Bratislava, Slovakia - NATO defense ministers Friday gave "broad support" to the counterinsurgency strategy proposed by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top US commander in Afghanistan, but sidestepped the difficult question of how many forces would be required to implement that plan.
The top UN special envoy for Afghanistan also backed McChrystal's strategy at the NATO meeting.
"We have come to a point where I believe McChrystal is right," said Kai Eide here Friday, adding bluntly, "If we continue the way we've done so far, both with regard to the military effort, the civilian effort, and the behavior of the Afghan government, this project will not work."
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When it comes to Afghanistan, this is an issue where the Bush administration got it wrong," James Rubin, a former State Department official for the Clinton administration, said on "Good Morning America" today.
"For seven years, they dithered, they wouldn't make the hard decision to finish the success they had in the first couple of months," he said. "The Obama administration is having to live with that mess. ... We really should focus on the fact that this is a Bush administration error."
Cheney has criticized President Obama for not immediately filling a request by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the lead U.S. commander on the ground in Afghanistan, for 40,000 additional troops. Critics of the previous administration say that former President George W. Bush himself let the request for 30,000 additional troops sit on his desk for nearly eight months and instead chose to focus more closely on the war in Iraq.
But supporters of Bush's decision to focus on the war in Iraq say it was a strategic move, and that even though he faced a much tougher battlefield in Afghanistan, he was still able to take Kabul within weeks.
"This guy, Obama, the president -- his whole focus during the campaign was Afghanistan is the war of necessity and now he has guys like Hamlet. He has a timeline on the timeline."
McChrystal has said the United States will need more troops for the operation to be successful. But Obama has yet to make a final decision on whether more troops should be sent.
The country will hold a runoff election next month, as Afghan President Hamid Karzai accepted results that he fell short of the number of votes needed to declare victory.
Meanwhile, back in the United States, there are deep divisions about what the president should do in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Cheney -- once famous for his aversion to the media -- took a swipe at Obama's strategy in Afghanistan in a speech Wednesday at the Center for Security Policy, a Washington, D.C., think tank.
The former vice president said Obama "seems afraid to make a decision" on troops in Afghanistan, and that "the White House must stop dithering while America's armed forces are in danger."
The White House pushed back strongly against the remark, with Press Secretary Robert Gibbs calling Cheney's comment "curious," given that "the vice president was for seven years not focused on Afghanistan. Even more curious given the fact that an increase in troops sat on desks in this White House, including the vice president's, for more than eight months, a resource request filled by President Obama in March."
"What Vice President Cheney calls 'dithering,'President Obama calls his solemn responsibility to the men and women in uniform and to the American public. I think we've all seen what happens when somebody doesn't take that responsibility seriously," Gibbs said Thursday.
Gibbs is lying again. This administration continues to lie about everything. I am getting so sick of it and the main stream medias complicity in it. No wonder they are attacking Fox News it seems to be the only news outlet willing to not cover up all of the lying.
Cheney has asked that the study that the Bush Administration conducted on the War in Afghanistan, which the incoming administration asked them not to release to the public, be made public now. This is the study that asked all of the questions, sorry Rahm you big liar making up another excuse that was completely a lie, and that the Barry admin used to send in the first 30,000 troops in during March. This administration is so dishonest that they make claims blaming everything on the Bush administration that they in fact asked the Bush administration to do in the first place.
Barry is going to continue to dither or fiddle if you want to go back to Nero until all of our allies are sick and tired of waiting for the leader to make a decision and pull their troops out. I am sure than that this will make Barry even more popular with his America hating radical left wing. While Al Queda and the Taliban go right back to their pre 9/11 status and destroy all normal Afghans way of life and force them back into the stone age, reopen the terror training camps and allow Al Queda to recruit even larger numbers who have been emboldened because the Great Satan and their weak President have again demonstrated to the world that nothing has changed since Vietnam. The US will not honor their commitments and will not stay the course.
See the unilateral decision to not put a missile defense system in Eastern Europe in our new and staunchest allies countries.
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