From CBS News by way of Political Wire:
Chip Reid asked White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs if senators were correct calling the July 2011 date for beginning to withdrawal troops from Afghanistan a “target,” meaning there was some wiggle room.
Writes Reid: “After the briefing, Gibbs went to the president for clarification. Gibbs then called me to his office to relate what the president said. The president told him it IS locked in — there is no flexibility. Troops WILL start coming home in July 2011. Period. It’s etched in stone. Gibbs said he even had the chisel.”
Some were critical of my opinion offering narrow support of the President’s policy today, and indeed many on both sides of the aisle (and whatever aisle progressive Republican Libertarian anti-imperialist pacifist Tyler Nixon now occupies), but the more I think about it, this Afghan policy announced last night, is just brilliant. He is giving the military and the Afghan government one final chance to make things right, with an iron clad end date that will eventually please the left. Now, the right will never be pleased, so forget them. They hate timetables for some stupid notion that the Taliban will just wait out the time table and strike after we leave. The point about staying in Afghanistan even a little while longer with 30,000 more troops is not so we can kill every single last Taliban or Al Queda present in Afghanistan. If that were our goal, then maybe, just maybe, that Republican complaint about timetables would have something to it.
Our goal is to make sure Afghanistan has a functioning government that can defend itself. And if the Taliban go underground until 2011, how is that a bad thing? If the Taliban lay low, it will give the Afghans time to train and begin to defend themselves. And by telling the Afghans we are leaving by a date certain, their government can finally get off their lazy asses and get to work, and the Afghan people will perhaps no longer see us as an occupier, thus thinning the ranks of Taliban recruits who would join the Taliban only to oppose America. It seems to me that the Taliban going underground to wait out the timetable sets the stage to allow this plan to work. And once we leave as an occupying force, remember, we will always have both military and CIA strike forces in the region at the ready to strike at the Taliban and Al Queda. That seems to be a lost element in all of this. Remember that when we talk about adding more troops to those already in Afghanistan we are talking about occupying troops that are attempting to keep the peace in the country. Once we pull those troops out, it is not like we are going to stop hunting down Al Queda and the Taliban, or Bin Laden. That will continue endlessly, so long as they are a threat to all people everywhere.