McCain has time and time again referred to Obama as “naive” and accused him of lacking the understanding of foreign affairs that our next President needs to possess.  McCain and Palin talk extensively about needing to trust the ground commanders, preach the success of the surge in Iraq, and how it needs to be moved to Afghanistan, belittling Obama for his talks of having to meet with the enemies and try to reach agreements, relying on more than just military means to come to resolution in our War on Terror.

Well, this time it would seem that the military mind of McCain is failing, and his declaration of needing to listen to the commanders on ground is something he should be heeding himself, as the commanders on ground don’t want another surge in Afghanistan.  It’s a separate country, with different issues and different challenges and we can’t treat it the same as Iraq.

Here’s a quote from McCain during a portion of one of the Presidential debates while discussing the surge and the success in Iraq, and what would have to be done in Afghanistan- “Sen. Obama calls for more troops, but what he doesn’t understand, it’s got to be a new strategy, the same strategy that he condemned in Iraq. It’s going to have to be employed in Afghanistan.”

Here’s General David McKiernan, Commander of NATO troops in Afghanistan- “(T)here are countless other differences between Iraq and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, it’s such a poor country, by any set of metrics you can imagine. A country that has very harsh geography. It’s very difficult to move around, getting back to our reliance on helicopters. It’s a country with very few natural resources, as opposed to the oil revenues that [Iraq] has. There’s very little money to be generated in terms of generated in Afghanistan. The literacy rate — you have a literate society in Iraq, you have a society that has a history of producing civil administrators, technocrats, middle class that are able to run the country in Iraq. You do not have that in Afghanistan. So there’s educational challenges, challenges of human capitol that I mentioned earlier.  So there are a lot of challenges. What I don’t think is needed — the word that I don’t use in Afghanistan is the word “surge.” There needs to be a sustained commitment of a variety of military and non-military resources, I believe. That’s my advice to winning in Afghanistan. It won’t be a short-term solution.”

Hmm… seems the two statements are a bit contradictory, doesn’t it?

Now, to contrast, here’s a little tidbit about how Obama is falling in line with the thinking of some military commanders:  General David Petraeus had sent a request to travel to Syria and meet with the government there to talk about ways to jointly stop the flow of insurgents crossing the border into Iraq.  His request was denied for the time being, but you have to admit the request to meet with leaders of countries that can be viewed as hostile sounds an awful lot like something one of the Candidates was suggesting, and was called “naive” for talking about, doesn’t it?

For all those voting for McCain due to his connection with the military and his faith in it’s leaders, this might be something to think about.  He seems to suffer the delusion that all the conflicts we’re currently engaged in can be handled in the same fashion, and diplomacy is secondary to military might, but even our military commanders will disagree with those opinions.

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