The Hill News

Bob Woodward’s new book, Obama’s Wars, contains loads of chewy nuggets. But one that risks getting overlooked, amid all the talk about whether Afghan President Hamid Karzai is “on meds” for manic depression, is Obama’s own judgment that “the cancer is in Pakistan.”

Despite all the administration infighting over an Afghan exit strategy last year detailed in the book, Obama is moving forward with his own plan. To my mind, he explained it in his last Oval Office address when he told the American people that his focus needed to be on digging out of the recession to help the middle class and that maintaining a war without end would not help achieve that goal. What will be critical is that when U.S. troops begin to pull out in July of next year, Afghanistan is not left in a worse mess than when the U.S. and its allies went in. Would it be politically justifiable to leave behind a failed state or a de facto partition of north and south?

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