Defense Secretary Robert Gates said during his farewell tour in Afghanistan that troops there were poised to deliver a “decisive blow” against the Taliban.
I’m not sure why anybody would buy that kind of rhetoric at this late date, unless they had some reason to believe this decisive blow was somehow different from the “turning point” of 2009 or the “decisive battle” of 2007 or any of the other pivotal, decisive moments in Afghanistan that have come and gone and were, in fact, not at all decisive, and can be quickly reviewed via a Google search.
I guess he can’t really give a speech in which he says the United States is on the cusp of a slow, miserable withdrawal from Afghanistan and that troops fought and died there for a decade for reasons that at this point seem unclear.
