Mike Allen quotes an administration official on Obama's new Afghanistan policy to be announced tomorrow:
President Barack Obama plans to announce an escalation in Afghanistan in a speech at the White House on Friday morning, committing 4,200 more troops and hundreds more civilians, and embracing a new system of benchmarks to measure progress.
"He's gone all in," said an official briefed on the plan. "This is Obama's war. He's pushed all the chips to the center of the table."
Some progressives will try and claim that this approach is exactly what they've counseled. The more honest among them will attack the president for escalating the war. But it's clear that the "all in" approach is not what they wanted. Earlier this week Ilan Goldenberg, the policy director at the progressive National Security Network, offered this analysis at the Huffington Post:
The "all in" approach, best exemplified by John McCain and Joe Lieberman's op-ed in the Washington Post, argues for "victory" through a full scale commitment of undetermined length at an undetermined cost. It is supported by hawks like McCain and Lieberman who generally believe that America must "win" any war no matter the cost.
Goldenberg conceded that most progressives and realists favored a "minimalist approach," though he predicted that the administration would pursue a "middle approach" that involves "doing what we can to help the people of Afghanistan, while limiting our military commitment and recognizing that America's ability to influence events in far off unstable states such as Afghanistan is incredibly limited."
I'm struck by a couple of things, but none more so than the fact that the administration's left-wing supporters don't seem to have any real insight into what's going on inside the administration--because the progressives have no real relationship with the "realists" who are making policy. Otherwise Goldenberg wouldn't have offered speculation that was so clearly off-base. Neither would Joe Klein have written just last week:
The Obama plan, I am told, will not immediately add to the 17,000 additional U.S. troops that the President has already approved. And this is the fight that McCain, Lieberman and the neocons are itching for...
The president is going "all in" and adding more troops to the fight. His most vocal supporters on the left had no idea this was coming and if you'd asked them yesterday what they thought of such a plan they would have said it was neocon fanaticism. Now watch how they fall into line. But this policy announcement shows just how little influence, and how little insight, the progressives have right now on this administration.
