BO Bungles Afghanistan

President Obama Fumbled Afghanistan
By Michael Yon
President Obama ascended to the power through audacity, oration, and artful manipulation.  In the United States and numerous Asian countries, I saw peoples’ eyes glaze with unconditional trust in a man who is unfit for office.
After the last election, I happened to be home from the wars, and in Washington DC for meetings.  President-elect Obama’s inauguration was nearby, and so I attended on that freezing morning.  Some of my detractors said, “Look at that, Yon’s joined forces with Obama.”  It was an historical event worth seeing. The new president would, after all, be the decider in the wars to which I would soon return.
Many inauguration spectators appeared to be in a trance.  Some hated President George Bush. Others talked about revenge for historical injustices.  For some it was about money for nothing, while for others it was about a sincere desire for hope and change from a vaguely defined status quo.  All were searching for something better or more.
Patriotism was noticeably thin at the inauguration.  Yes, there were thousands of American flags, though team spirit would be more evident at a college football game. The flags were waving in a breeze laced with the stench of entitlement.  It was not a God Bless America day. It was a God Bless Me day.
And there he was.  Our new President. I determined to support him until he proved unworthy.  Almost four years later, many people have snapped out of the trance, and that includes many non-Americans here in Asia.  Obama’s magic wand has been broken over the knee of reality.
I cannot speak about the economy, education or healthcare, but I can speak about Afghanistan.  Obama cannot be faulted that Afghanistan is stone-aged, or that our military strategy was wrecked when he took office.  It was.  The bus was in a ditch. Obama showed up with a wrecker, promising to yank it out.  Today the wrecker is in the ditch atop the bus.
President Obama did fire General McChrystal and send General Petraeus to Afghanistan, which was smart.  But now Director Petraeus is at the CIA, and not where we most need him, which is in the military.  President Obama’s mishandling of the war has left many of us disillusioned.
Our leaders have repeatedly seen national news outlets indict the inadequacy of our MEDEVAC systems in Afghanistan.  It can be said, “Yes, but it was done this way during the last administration.”  True.  And this administration promised hope and change.
Despite sustained national coverage of the MEDEVAC issue and direct appeals to the White House and Obama’s chosen Secretary of Defense, our helicopters still fly over Islamic Afghanistan wearing Red Crosses, which signals that the helicopters are unarmed, has caused unforgivable delays removing wounded troops from the battlefield.
Afghanistan: In October 2001, we destroyed Mullah Omar’s mosque in Sangesar Village, down in Kandahar Province.  His second of three wives, Guljana, was from this village.  His family lived there.  This tiny mosque literally was the birthplace of the Taliban.
Under President Obama, ten years later in 2011, US troops renovated Mullah Omar’s mosque in Sangesar.  First we bombed it in 2001.  Then we fixed it in 2011.  This remains one of the most dangerous areas of Afghanistan.
Perhaps we forgot that Mullah Omar gave Osama bin Laden sanctuary, and bin Laden then attacked America.
The symbolic appeasement represented by refurbishing the mosque is enormous. The place is in the middle of fields of poppy.  Renovating this mosque in Sangesar is like building a dual monument to al Qaeda, and drug cartels.
We are not in this together.  Sangesar is an enemy village.  Our troops still die there.
In 2012, Mullah Omar praised the murders of Coalition forces.  General John Allen, the US commander at the time, called it “an unmistakable message of death.”  Mullah Omar was so busy directing the faithful to murder our troops that he forgot to express gratitude for the revenue stream from opium, and for the renovated mosque demonstrating his potency.
This year, the casualties continue.   In March, at Sangesar, three Afghan insiders turned their guns on Americans, killing Staff Sergeant Jordan Bear from Denver, and Specialist Payton Jones from Marble Falls, Texas.  Another Soldier was wounded.  That is the payment we can expect for appeasing Islamic-narco-terrorists.
I was in the general area last year, and in previous years, and it was mostly about combat.  Our young troops are something to be proud of, and if you saw them in action you would be amazed at their courage and professionalism.  The mess we shoved them into is a national shame. We provided about half the troops required for the stated strategy, then began pulling them out against a domestic political deadline that has nothing to do with the war.  The surge has been a complete waste of effort.
America saw both President Obama and Governor Romney endorse our Afghanistan strategy during their last debate, where ISAF forces train the Afghan Army and Police as a prelude to our disengagement in 2014. This is a broken strategy, with Afghans murdering so many of their trainers.
At least 30% of Afghan trainees must be replaced annually due to desertions and endemic corruption. Training Afghans to replace Coalition forces is not working. As we draw down, the enemy will be able to focus on fewer troops. Hollow Afghan units will collapse, and corrupt Afghan politicians will finally abscond to Dubai.  We should cut our losses and remove the bulk of our force.
Although Obama needs to go home, this is no guarantee that Romney will do better. If Romney is elected, he will need a bigger wrecker.  He is guaranteed the same honest chance that Obama received.  Nothing less, nothing more.

BO And Other Has-Beens

Stephens: Barack Obama and Other Has-Beens

Yesterday's man of destiny is today's peddler of spent ideas.

• By BRET STEPHENS

On the eve of the U.S. presidential election four years ago, educated people nearly everywhere understood that China was the country of the future, green was the energy of the future, and Barack Obama was a man of destiny. How quaint it all seems now.
In a remarkable piece of investigative journalism last week in the New York Times, reporter David Barboza identified assets worth $2.7 billion belonging to various members of the family of Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, including his 90-year-old mother, a retired schoolteacher named Yang Zhiyun.

"The details of how Ms. Yang, a widow, accumulated such wealth are not known, or even if she was aware of the holdings in her name," Mr. Barboza reports. "But it happened after her son was elevated to China's ruling elite, first in 1998 as vice prime minister and then five years later as prime minister."

The Times report would be interesting were it about any leading Chinese official. But Mr. Wen is in a category unto himself, having spent his political career cultivating the image of a kindly old man—"Grandpa Wen"—with a humble background, a common touch, a scientific mind and an uncorrupted soul. In March he was instrumental in firing disgraced Chongqing Party chief Bo Xilai, another fabulously wealthy servant of the proletariat. The prime minister is supposed to embody the moral fiber of the Communist Party.

Perhaps he does. Perhaps he's even the best of the bunch: In February, Bloomberg reported that "the net worth of the 70 richest delegates in China's National People's Congress . . . rose to 565.8 billion yuan ($89.8 billion) in 2011, a gain of $11.5 billion from 2010." That averages out to more than $1 billion per delegate, and we're not even talking about the senior party leadership.

All this is good to know as a reminder that China, so recently extolled as the very model of technocratic know-how, turns out to be a country heavily populated at the top by rent-seekers and kleptocrats. Should that be surprising? Not if you think that nothing else can come from the lucrative crossroads where politically directed capital and politically connected individuals meet.

This brings us to Al Gore.

Earlier this month the Washington Post's Carol Leonnig reported that the former vice president's wealth is today estimated at $100 million, up from less than $2 million when he left government service on a salary of $181,400. How did he make this kind of money? It wasn't his share of the Nobel Peace Prize. Nor was it the book and movie proceeds from "An Inconvenient Truth."

Instead, as Ms. Leonnig reports, "Fourteen green-tech firms in which Gore invested received or directly benefited from more than $2.5 billion in loans, grants and tax breaks, part of President Obama's historic push to seed a U.S. renewable-energy industry with public money."

That's nice work if you can get it—at least if you're on the investment-management end of the deal. But what if you're on the worker-bee end?

The Post story mentions one of the beneficiaries of Mr. Gore's investment acumen, Milwaukee-based Johnson Controls, which won a $299 million award from the federal government in 2009 to make electric-car batteries. Here's how that worked out:

"The company has dramatically scaled back, after executives concluded demand for electric cars was far lower than the administration forecast. The factory outfitted with stimulus funds is nearly idle, and plans to build a second plant have been postponed."

And so to Barack Obama.

When the history of this administration is written, maybe someone will note the dissonance between the president's hip persona and his retro ideology. Here was a man who promised a "transformative" presidency. Yet when transformation came, it amounted to a two-pronged attempt to impose, from one side, a version of European social democracy by way of ObamaCare, and from the other side a version of Chinese state-directed "capitalism" by way of the stimulus.

As a political matter it may have been Mr. Obama's good luck that the bankruptcy of both models became obvious only after he had gotten his way legislatively on both. Yet the president's sagging fortunes have everything to do with his buying into an ideological enthusiasm too late. In a different age, Mr. Obama would have been the guy who went out and bought an Edsel. In this age, Mr. Obama is the guy demanding that you buy an Edsel, too. That car is today called the Volt.

Mr. Obama might still squeak by. He has, in addition to incumbency and a vestige of likability, the benefit of a challenger who only found his stride very late in the campaign. But a second term will mean four years of spent ideas packaged in shopworn rhetoric, to be shoved down the national throat by a president with nothing politically to lose.

Sound appealing?
Write to bstephens@wsj.com