I hate to say it, but this just seems absurdly stupid to me:
On Thursday, during a visit to NATO headquarters here, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal admitted that preparations for perhaps the most critical operation of the war — the campaign to take control of Kandahar, the Taliban’s birthplace — weren’t going as planned. He said winning support from local leaders, some of whom see the Taliban fighters not as oppressors but as their Muslim brothers, was proving tougher than expected. The military side of the campaign, originally scheduled to surge in June and finish by August, is now likely to extend into the fall.
“I don’t intend to hurry it,” McChrystal told reporters traveling with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. “It will take a number of months for this to play out. But I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. It’s more important we get it right than we get it fast.”
But McChrystal does not have time on his side. The day before he revealed the Kandahar delay, his boss, Gates, said that the U.S.-led coalition has until the end of the year to show progress in the war and prove to the United States and its allies that their forces have broken a stalemate with the Taliban.
“All of us, for our publics, are going to have to show by the end of the year that our strategy is on the right track and making some headway,” Gates said Wednesday during a visit to London to meet with British leaders.
McChrystal said he was confident that his counterinsurgency strategy was bearing fruit and that he would be in position to demonstrate that by year’s end. “The perception that the insurgency has momentum is reversing,” he said. “Progress won’t show every day, but it will show over time.”
…But McChrystal said it was taking longer than expected to gain the blessing of local tribal leaders — and Kandaharis in general — for the operation. He also said commanders needed more time to ensure that the Afghan government could step in after the fighting stops and provide effective public services, which Kandahar has lacked for years.
“When you go to protect people, the people have to want you to protect them,” McChrystal told reporters. “It’s a deliberate process. It takes time to convince people.”
I mean, you go to a guy and you say, “sometime in the next few months, we’re going blow your city to shit. We just want to see if you’ll sign off on that. So, is that cool? Do you have any concerns?”
And you top it off by telling them you’ll be bringing in Karzai’s people to run things.
