During her debate with Joe Biden tonight, Sarah Palin leveled a most curious charge against Barack Obama on the subject of Afghanistan:
Now, Barack Obama had said that all we’re doing in Afghanistan is air-raiding villages and killing civilians. And such a reckless, reckless comment and untrue comment, again, hurts our cause.
That would be an odd thing for Obama, a strong supporter of U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan, to say. But if he did in fact note the growing and unacceptable Afghan civilian death toll, he’d be in agreement with just about everyone, including Afghan president Karzai, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and many other American military officials. Palin is living in an alternate reality on this issue, and someone should call her on it — during the debate itself would have been nice. This won’t be counted as a “gaffe” on Palin’s part, but it should be.
**Update: Here is a reader’s comment that deserves to be amended to my original post:
I remember the comment Palin was referring to. It’s often cited by conservatives, but they usually leave out the first half of the quote and generally seem to completely miss its point.
What Obama said (on August 13, 2007) was “we’ve got to get the job done there [in Afghanistan], and that requires us to have enough troops that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous problems there.”
And he was absolutely right. If you’re going to fight an effective war and rebuild a shattered country, each of those tasks requires a significant investment of personnel. Without that, you’re limited to push-button, remote-control tactics, which tend to kill lots of civilians and do nothing to help stabilize the country… indeed, quite the opposite.
To twist a statement of what should be common sense and imply that it’s some sort of insult against our troops is what’s “reckless,” “untrue” and “hurtful to our cause.”
