Bob Herbert: Doubling troops in Afghanistan a 'terrible idea' David Edwards and Muriel Kane

Published: Wednesday January 14, 2009





Print This Email This With Barack Obama signaling his intention to keep much of Bush's war team in place, observers like MSNBC's Rachel Maddow are starting to wonder whether anything is really likely to change.



In Afghanistan, Obama is planning to nearly double the number of US ground troops but, says, Maddow, "It is unclear exactly why he is doing that -- and what his long-term intentions are."



New York Times columnist Bob Herbert also believes that widening the war in Afghanistan as the US hovers on the brink of depression is a terrible idea.



Herbert wrote last week, "What Mr. Obama doesnt need, and what the U.S. cannot under any circumstances afford, is any more unnecessary warfare. And yet, while we havent even figured out how to extricate ourselves from the disaster in Iraq, Mr. Obama is planning to commit thousands of additional American troops to the war in Afghanistan, which is already more than seven years old and which long ago turned into a quagmire."



"Get out of it as quickly as you can," Herbert told Maddow on Tuesday when asked how you deal with a quagmire.



"I think this is a terrible idea, doubling the troops in Afghanistan," Herbert went on. "It reminds me very much of Jack Kennedy coming into office in 1961 and we had advisers in Vietnam. We should have learned the lesson of the French in Indo-China -- we didn't. We should have learned the lesson, in this case, of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan -- we apparently haven't."



"How are we going to pay for this escalation?" Herbert asked. "Who's going to fight this war? The troops who are going to be going into Afghanistan in many cases have already served two, three, four, or more tours in combat zones in Afghanistan and Iraq."



Herbert acknowledged that the US still has an interest in preventing terrorists from establishing a safe haven in Afghanistan, but he insisted, "We need to expand our intelligence efforts and we need to focus on not allowing terrorists to develop plans to attack the United States -- not on nation-building."



"At some point, we have to get over this idea of these foreign military adventures," Herbert concluded. "We have to wind it down in Iraq. ... We need to wind it down in Afghanistan. ... We've got to bring it down and then have a discussion on how to go forward -- not ratchet it up and then decide what we're going to do."





This video is from MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show, broadcast Jan. 13, 2009.









Download video via RawReplay.com







