Victory or Defeat: Obama Is Now ‘the Decider’

Kim Holmes / November 30, 2009

President Obama has finally made a decision on Afghanistan, which he will communicate to an anxious nation tomorrow night. The White House announcement no doubt has already fueled many kitchen-table conversations during this Thanksgiving weekend, maybe even heated debates. For the sake of our national security, let’s hope most families have concluded that abandoning Afghanistan without achieving our aims is not an option.

Some will still waver of course, which is why the president must use his bully pulpit to explain why it is in the vital interests of the United States to defeat the Taliban, destroy al-Qaeda, and establish a free, sovereign Afghanistan that can govern itself and look after its own people. He will be speaking from West Point, and his audience surely knows what is at stake.

Failure to achieve these goals is not an option, for it would be a direct threat to our national well-being. That’s not theory; it’s historical fact. We’ve already walked away from Afghanistan once, in the early 1990s, thinking that what happened there couldn’t possibly hurt us here. We were wrong. (more…)