When John McCain questioned Robert Gates and Mike Mullen about the date of troop withdrawal given out by Obama as being Jul 11 he was told that the administration would review the situation in Dec 10 and then take a final call. That’s rather understandable but in that case why give out this date of withdrawal at all? And that’s the first flaw with his strategy. Once you have given these dates Taliban may play a waiting game thereby giving a false picture to the decision making authorities, NATO. As things stand today, they are nowhere close to winning that war. And then to expect them to turn things around to an extent to enable them to start pulling out in just eighteen months is rather naive. Actually, they don’t even have eighteen months to achieve that. It’s more like seven or eight months because the entire lot of 30,000 troops which Obama announced will only reach Afghanistan by May 10 and the decision will be taken in Dec 10. To expect things to go from what they are right now wherein they need more troops to thinking of pulling out in this short a period is crazy, even for laypersons like you and me. Even if you go by what Gen McChrystal had said wherein he demanded 40,000 more troops and that too without any time line of eighteen months to begin withdrawal goes to show that either Obama’s generals are not exactly in sync with him or worse, Obama himself is not in sync with his generals in Afghanistan.
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