After publicly bashing the Afghan government for months, airing their doubts as to whether we have a reliable “partner,” and stalling a decision about the troops while the election was redone (but not really, as the challenger dropped out), the Obami have decided to be nice, or nicer, at any rate, to the government we are trying to stabilize. The Washington Post reports:
As President Obama nears a decision on how many more troops he will dispatch to Afghanistan, his top diplomats and generals are abandoning for now their get-tough tactics with Karzai and attempting to forge a far warmer relationship. They recognize that their initial strategy may have done more harm than good, fueling stress and anger in a beleaguered, conspiracy-minded leader whom the U.S. government needs as a partner.
“It’s not sustainable to have a ‘War of the Roses’ relationship here, where . . . we basically throw things at each other,” said another senior administration official . . .
The tension in the relationship stems from the cumulative impact of several White House decisions that were intended to improve the quality of the Afghan government. When Obama became president, he discontinued his predecessor’s practice of holding bimonthly video conferences with Karzai. Obama granted wide latitude to the hard-charging Holbrooke to pressure Karzai to tackle the corruption and mismanagement that have fueled the Taliban’s rise. The administration also indicated that it wanted many candidates to challenge Karzai in the August presidential election.
It turns out that the bullying routine was about as successful in Afghanistan as it has been in the Middle East. But don’t expect much self-reflection. Hillary Clinton is now tasked with the charm offensive. We learn: “As Mr. Karzai begins his new term, Mrs. Clinton has worked to avoid a hectoring tone in her public comments about him. American officials had done too much of that in the past, she said.” The past, meaning the past few months, I suppose.
Once again it seems as though we are having to relearn the lessons of Iraq. There, too, Democrats sneered at the government as hopeless and at its prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, as ineffectual and inept. With the success of the surge and the breathing room to establish a functioning civil government, that perception has changed. And likewise, in Afghanistan, the Obami may be learning belatedly (because they have chosen not to extract any meaningful lessons from the Iraq war, which they were ready to lose) that we actually need to bolster the native government if we hope to defeat our mutual enemy. You’d think smart diplomats would have figured this out much sooner.
The remark was aimed at Edwards’ constituents. Hillary Clinton needs them to make it on the first ballot. The Clintons main interest is their own ambitions, in this case the nomination. Positions on any issue is secondary. Whatever their perceived constituency can be convinced to desire.
All the evidence is that Hillary WAS a champion of welfare reform despite the opposition of her fiends, the Edelmans.
From Mickey Kaus’ blog – http://www.kausfiles.com/archive/index.07.13.99.html
Hillaryphiles on the left, and Hillaryphobes on the right, have something in common: neither group believes the First Lady could possibly have endorsed her husband’s signing of the radical 1996 GOP-designed welfare reform bill. On the Hillaryphobe side, The Wall Street Journals’s Paul Gigot wrote skeptically about Mrs. Clinton “reinventing” herself as a “born again moderate” in her appearance at New York Senator Pat Moynihan’s farm. Among other things, Hillary said that though she had some “strong concerns” about early Republican versions of the welfare bill, “eventually the bill was in a state that I felt should be signed.” Gigot laughs at this –”T]he first lady now says she was for it all along” — and describes Hillary, in what may become the standard GOP caricature, as a lefty rewriting her history to get elected.
Gigot and the Republicans should rethink this line of attack, because the evidence is that Hillary really did favor her husband’s signing of the welfare bill. I don’t know this for sure, of course. But the people I’ve talked with in and out of the White House who know the most (and who are not, I think, “trying to demonstrate their closeness to the President”) all say Hillary favored signing the bill and seemed comfortable with that decision. I also know that she met with at least one respected, moderately conservative supporter of the legislation, Douglas Besharov of the American Enterprise Institute, shortly before the decision was irrevocably made. Presumably Hillary wanted to reassure herself that the legislation was acceptable.
Jerry Skurnik,
Hillary wants to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by fleeing headlong from Iraq. Nobody here is likely to overlook that fact just because you threw out some mindless misdirection about welfare reform.