While President Barack Obama’s newly announced Afghan strategy is imperfect, Republicans ought to resist the temptation to lambaste it.

Indeed, some in the GOP are already beating up on the president’s approach. Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch said, “The president has handicapped our forces by failing to provide the number of troops requested by his handpicked commander, Gen. [Stanley] McChrystal” and by setting “arbitrary withdrawal deadlines.”

Former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson, sniping that Obama “sounded like Lady Churchill,” contended that we lack “a determined president whose heart is in the effort.”

Meanwhile, Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz went further, declaring to POLITICO that “it is time to bring our soldiers home.”

But these folks are missing the point: The substance, optics and politics of the Afghan surge suggest that Republicans should back the president’s strategy.

• Substance: Obama’s announcement that he’s sending an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, coupled with another 4,000 NATO troops, doesn’t quite satisfy McChrystal’s minimum request, but it comes pretty darn close. The president’s plan sets an unrealistic goal of withdrawing troops in less than two years, but it also stoutly reaffirms our commitment to victory. And it definitively rejects the flawed advice of those, such as Vice President Joe Biden, who thought it possible to vanquish Al Qaeda with special forces alone.

In his uneven West Point address, the president at times waxed neoconservative, observing that we aim to extirpate the ruthless Al Qaeda forces and the repressive Taliban elements friendly to them. He even echoed Bush’s second inaugural when he asserted our children’s “lives will be better if other people’s children and grandchildren can live in freedom and access opportunity.”

True, Obama, as is his wont, felt compelled to criticize his predecessor’s “under-resourcing” of the war and to gratuitously fault our initiation of the Iraq war. He also indulged in a self-serving, defensive attempt to excuse his lengthy delay in making this crucial decision.

But the president correctly noted that we cannot defeat Al Qaeda without bolstering the regimes in Kabul and Islamabad, boldly pledged to “reverse the Taliban’s momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government,” firmly distinguished Afghanistan from Vietnam and repeatedly emphasized the importance of concluding the war “successfully.”

And while the president’s plans to hasten the arrival of new forces into theater “at the fastest possible pace” no doubt reflect his political desire to speed up a drawdown in 2011, they will also accelerate the troops’ impact, a most welcome military development. 

• Payback (or lack thereof): Many Democrats and almost all liberal activists vocally opposed President George W. Bush’s conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now Republicans have an opportunity to show they support our troops and their mission, no matter what, and to back our commander in chief as he prosecutes a difficult and demanding, but decisively important, war. In short, the GOP can put the “loyal” back into loyal opposition.

• Politics: Supporting Obama’s Afghan surge makes good political sense for the GOP for two independent reasons.

First, although the GOP has rightly opposed almost all of Obama’s misguided domestic initiatives, the party has a chance to demonstrate that it’s not reflexively anti-Obama and that it doesn’t just say “up” when he says “down.” By supporting the president on a critical foreign policy issue — about which Republicans largely agree — the GOP can present its opposition to Obamacare, cap and trade, and domestic spending as that much more reasonable and well thought out.

Second, given the pervasive antipathy to the Afghan war among liberal activists and elected Democrats (67 percent of Democrats oppose the surge, according to last week’s Gallup Poll), backing the president’s strategy also helps the GOP drive a wedge between the president, who remains personally popular, and congressional Democrats, who do not. Republicans would be foolish not to exploit an intra-Democratic rift, especially as midterm elections near.

Earlier this week, The Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes wrote, “If he were still a senator and a Republican president were proposing a troop buildup in Afghanistan, Obama would probably be against it.” But Obama is now the president with his own unruly rank and file backbiting him. Why would Republicans side with the back-benchers, who are so much more vulnerable than the president himself?

Obama rousingly concluded his speech by urging us not to be “split asunder” by “rancor and cynicism and partisanship” and to summon the unity forged by our “determination to defend our homeland and the values we hold dear.” Republicans would do well to heed our president’s message.

Source:http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1209/30121.html