{"id":13893,"date":"2009-08-24T05:15:12","date_gmt":"2009-08-24T10:15:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=13893"},"modified":"2009-08-24T05:15:12","modified_gmt":"2009-08-24T10:15:12","slug":"just-stay-in-your-lane-admiral","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=13893","title":{"rendered":"Just stay in your lane, admiral"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, if the Washington Post<\/a> can be believed, has expressed concern that the public support for the war in Afghanistan is slipping;<\/p>\n

Mullen also expressed concern over recent opinion polls indicating that for the first time a majority of Americans do not think the war in Afghanistan is worth fighting.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I wasn’t aware that military hierarchy was supposed to be worried about the political implications of fighting wars. I’ve always thought that the military’s job was to fight the wars that politicians told them to fight and let the elected representatives worry about public opinion. I’ll grant that President Obama has done a piss-poor job of making the case that we need to continue to press the fight on the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but it’s certainly not the admiral’s job to comment on public opinion.<\/p>\n

Now, Karl Eikenberry was also on the networks yesterday morning making the same case. My former platoon leader, the ambassador to Afghanistan, should be out there making those statements, he’s a political appointee now. But the Admiral should stick to military issues and leave worrying about public opinion to the folks who get elected.<\/p>\n

In my mind, this how the Obama Administration is putting out feelers to withdraw from Afghanistan, though. The President acts like it’s distracting his domestic agenda, so I’m sure he wants to abandon the tiny resource free country. That’s a mistake…we’d be repeating the mistake we made in 1988 when we abandoned Afghanistan after the withdrawal of the Soviet troops leaving it ripe for the Taliban to pick. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, if the Washington Post can … Just stay in your lane, admiral<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-barack-obama","category-military-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13893"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13893\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}