Today’s White House Watch column offers a good example of why the column will be missed after it ends tomorrow. Dan Froomkin, the columnist/blogger who has been writing it for several years, takes on President Barack Obama, the press and the seemingly forgotten war in Afghanistan.
One of my many regrets is that I didn’t get around to writing more about Obama’s Afghanistan policy, its extraordinarily bloody ramifications, how it threatens to sink the nation in a Vietnam-like quagmire — and, most significantly, how the president has never really made the case for his decision to increase rather than decrease our troop presence there.
There are plenty of authoritative arguments being publicly made by knowledgeable people that Obama is going about things the wrong way. This is way more the case, say, than before former president George W. Bush took the nation to war in Iraq. And yet Obama has never acknowledged or addressed those arguments — and the press has not forced him to.
Before a president sends troops (or more troops) into harm’s way, it seems to me he should be forced not only to explain why he thinks he’s right, but why he thinks his critics are wrong. As I thought we’d learned in Iraq, giving the president a pass on this sort of thing is a very bad idea.
And bad policy on Obama’s part.
Hank Kalet 
Do you remember the 1972 film, \”The Hot Rock\” with Robert Redford. He puts a bank vault caretaker under hypnosis with the phrase \”Afghanistan Bananastan.\” Those were the good old days when Afghanistan was just a word, it was a far away exotic place name that we had little knowledge of and didn't have to care about.Fast forward to 2009 and things are totally different. Afghanistan is almost a household word and it is a grim reality that intrudes upon our consciousness all to frequently.We have been in Afghanistan since October 7, 2001. Enough already, get the troops out of there, bring them home now. We are an occupying force and any good we have done there is undone by the accidental killings of innocent Afghanis, men, women, children and the elderly. That's not a way to win hearts and minds. Obama inherited this blood bath form Bush but now it is his problem, his war. As if he doesn't have enough on his plate. We need to disengage from Afghanistan ASAP because at some point we will be forced out in any case. The Brits and the USSR had to leave and at some point we will be forced out, too.