I saw an interview with David Petraeus on NBC last night. Lester Holt pitched him a number of softball questions about Afghanistan, to which he responded by saying that the Afghan military only refused to fight because it knew that help wasn’t coming.
Let’s dig into that response more than Holt did:
- If Petraeus was saying that America was obligated to come to the rescue, one can only assume he meant the Afghan military was designed by him and his successors to be dependent on American help in perpetuity. At what point did Petraeus tell America that we were committed to stay in Afghanistan forever, and what right did he have to obligate us in that manner? If, on the other hand, he was actually trying to build an Afghan military that would survive on its own, he certainly did a pathetic job of it, didn’t he?
- If Petraeus meant that the fault lies with the Afghan government in not coming to the rescue, that is on the Afghans, not us, isn’t it?