As expected, the Left is not happy about what it heard from Clinton, Gates, and Petraeus this Sunday. “There is no deadline.” “We’re not talking about an exit strategy or a drop dead deadline.””There’s no timeline, no ramp, nothing like that.” Now in Afghanistan, Sec. of Defense Robert Gates is stepping up the rhetoric again:
“We are in this thing to win,” Gates told reporters while traveling to Kabul, where he plans to meet privately with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and later with troops bearing the brunt of combat. The secretary’s trip to Afghanistan is the first by a Cabinet member since President Barack Obama’s announcement last week that he will deploy 30,000 more troops with the intention of starting to bring them home in July 2011.
As Bob Schieffer noted on “Face the Nation” Sunday, Gates is saying what Obama didn’t. Here’s his exchange with Clinton about it:
SCHIEFFER: Madame Secretary, let me ask you about one thing the president said. In this entire speech he talked about handing over authority to the Afghans. But he never included the words ‘win’ or ‘victory’ as far as I know it in that speech. He just talked about avoiding an open ended commitment. Have we given up trying to win? Do we think that’s no longer possible? Is victory no longer possible? CLINTON: Well Bob, I thinkhe talked about success and that’s what we’re looking toward. We do believe we can be successful. SCHIEFFER: Well what is success? CLINTON: Well success is doing what we have set forth as our primary goal, which is to disrupt, dismantle,and defeat Al Qaeda. It is also being able to stand up an Afghan security force so that they can defend themselves and partnering with the Afghan government and people so that they will not once again become a safe haven for terrorists. And I think part of our very careful deliberation over the last months was to ask ourselves really hard questions. Like okay, who is the enemy? Is it every young boy who is coerced into joining the Taliban or who decides he can make more money being a fighting member of the Taliban than he can being a member of the Afghan security army? You know we thought hard about that. And no, we don’t think so. We think those are people that actually if we reverse and break the momentum of the Taliban, which we think can very well happen with the strategy that we’re pursing, that a lot of these people are going to come back over. They don’t want to see the return of the Taliban. There’s absolutely no evidence that Afghans are in any way supportive of that.
