Forget About That 2011 Withdrawal Date

With David Petraeus running the show in Afghanistan, you can forget about US troops beginning to withdraw as promised in July of next year, writes Andrew Sullivan. Obama's pledge is "now kaput," he writes at his Daily Dish blog at the Atlantic. "It won't happen. I doubt it will happen in a second term either." Petraeus, remember, is the architect of the Afghan strategy.

Though the general tells CNN that he supports Obama's plans, Sullivan says he won't "concede the impossibility of success in Afghanistan just as he still retains the absurd notion that the surge in Iraq somehow worked in reconciling the sectarian divides that still prevent Iraq from having a working government." The Afghan war is a huge mistake, "an imperialism of self-defense, a commitment to civilize even the least tractable culture on earth because Americans are too afraid of the consequences of withdrawal." The irony is that the war will actually make things worse as a Jihadist recruiting tool.
(More David Petraeus stories.)