Democrats tried to offset their treasonable deeds and words regarding the counterinsurgency in Iraq by saying that Afghanistan was the place where a “surge” was needed. That view might seem confirmed by the fact that 2009 has already seen the highest number of fatalities to coalition forces of any year of the war, but it must be kept in mind that the campaign to drive the Taliban from power ended victoriously well in advance of the US-UK invasion of Iraq, and that not until late 2005 (inspired, no doubt, by Western leftists' opposition to their own polities' war efforts in that country) did the Taliban begin a push to reclaim their authority. (Their position on this issue reminds me of their criticism of George W. Bush for not paying enough attention to North Korea; I also found the President's policy toward Kim Jong-Il inconsistent with his stance toward Saddam “Hussein,” but I disliked their hypocrisy, since, after all, Bush wouldn't have inherited either crisis if his Democratic predecessor had done his job.) Anyway, now that someone who actually knows anything about the situation in Afghanistan (Gen. McChrystal) has requested a greater commitment of manpower in order to implement the strategy that our President proclaimed when he was still pretending to be a hawk, these same Democrats, even with one of their own in the Oval Office, oppose the escalation that they said they favored when our troops were suffering a fraction of the number of casualties that they are now. Perhaps they have no more confidence in Obama as commander-in-chief than I do.
It remains for me in this uncommon commentary to address the question of why the fortunes of the terrorists in Afghanistan have been waxing. Since Afghan police say that the suicide attacks that occur there are not carried out by their own people, one probable factor is that terrorists from elsewhere are now moving into that land rather than Iraq for the opportunity to fight the Infidel. Leftists commonly develop obsessive hatred for any Republican who occupies the Oval Office; I don't want to fall into a similar trap regarding Emperor Nerobama, blaming him for everything that's going wrong in the world, and so I won't go so far as to attribute the negative developments in Afghanistan to his poor leadership. I'll say merely that the attainment to the USA's highest office of someone whose candidacy was endorsed by foreign enemies of the country (Qaddafi, Ortega, the Castro brothers, Hamas), and who has had close associations with its domestic enemies (Jeremiah Wright, William Ayres, et cetera), can only have boosted their morale. I'll also say, to conclude, that the Afghan situation at least demonstrates that Obama’s election to the presidency has not been the “game-changer” in relation to terrorism that many of those who voted for him actually expected it to be (although in a perverse way, they were right: the “War on Terror” was lost on Election Day 2008).
