October 2, 2009: Top Commander Confirms Biden's Strategy is Dangerous

Wasn't Joe Biden supposed to be a foreign policy genius? Not so much, apparently:

The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, used a speech here Thursday to reject calls for the war effort to be scaled down from defeating the Taliban insurgency to a narrower focus on hunting down al Qaeda, an option suggested by Vice President Joe Biden as part of the current White House strategy review.

But he used the London session for a frank rebuttal of the idea of a more narrowly focused war. When a questioner asked him whether he would support scaling back the American military presence over the next 18 months by relinquishing the battle with the Taliban and focusing on tracking down al Qaeda, sparing ground troops by hunting al Qaeda extremists and their leaders with missiles from unmanned drones, he replied: "The short answer is: no."

"You have to navigate from where you are, not from where you wish to be," he said. "A strategy that does not leave Afghanistan in a stable position is probably a shortsighted strategy."

Source: San Francisco Chronicle

McChrystal went on to say that scaling back in Afghanistan would turn the troubled nation into "Chaos-istan."