“Tonight, I’d like to tell you how we will complete our mission and end the war in Afghanistan,” Obama said Tuesday. We’re still waiting.
That's the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson on why Americans can't understand what their president can't explain, or maybe it's why Americans can't explain what their president can't understand. In any case, it's about unanswered questions surrounding Barack Obama's surprise media-availability sessions in Afghanistan this week.
This might be at least partly the source of the confusion: "And so 10 years ago the United States and our allies went to war to make sure that al-Qaida could never again use this country to launch attacks against us." Thus spake Obama at Baghram. In fact, for the "allies" among the UN_mandated, NATO-led 47-member ISAF military coalition, the whole point has not been to make America safe from al-Qaida. The United States itself has had (or at least once had) rather more Afghanistan-related reasons to involve its soldiers in Afghanistan too. Like building a sovereign and democratic UN member state where there was just a big black hole, for instance. Whatever happened to that, anyway?
