Tide is Turning?
Afghanistan: General Stanley McChrystal Tells Diane Sawyer Surge Blunted Taliban – ABC News
“We’ve been at this for about seven months now and I believe we’ve made progress. It’s not a completed mission yet,” he said.
McChrystal cited as evidence a meeting he recently held in a river valley in Helmand province, an area where the Taliban has been strong and was one of the first targets of the American surge.
“When I sit in an area that the Taliban controlled only seven months ago and now you meet with a shura of elders and they describe with considerable optimism the future, you sense the tide is turning,” he said.
The challenge, of course, isn’t clearing territory and then holding a meeting. It will be a long time before we have any sense of whether the insurgency has actually been constrained in a meaningful way. Clearly, the concept of momentum has some utility, and creating the impression that we are “winning” is probably a significant goal of the surge. But given the fact that we have not “surged” many of our forces yet, the whole story strikes me as IO. A couple of months ago, we needed an extra 30,000 men urgently. Now, before those forces have even arrived, we’ve turned the tide. How does that make sense?
