A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

I would like to say that I am surprised that this hasn't gotten more attention:

Sporting a shiny new American flag pin at an appearance in Rush Limbaugh's hometown, Sen. Barack Obama came up with some novel reasons why the U.S. may be struggling in the war in Afghanistan.

"We don't have enough capacity right now to deal with it -- and it's not just the troops," Obama, D-Ill., told a crowd in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.

Obama posited -- incorrectly -- that Arabic translators deployed in Iraq are needed in Afghanistan -- forgetting, momentarily, that Afghans don't speak Arabic.

"We only have a certain number of them and if they are all in Iraq, then its harder for us to use them in Afghanistan," Obama said.

The vast majority of military translators in both war zones are drawn from the local population.
Naturally they speak the local language. In Iraq, that's Arabic or Kurdish. In Afghanistan, it's any of a half dozen other languages -- including Pashtu, Dari, and Farsi.

No sooner did Obama realize his mistake -- and correct himself -- but he immediately made another.

"We need agricultural specialists in Afghanistan, people who can help them develop other crops than heroin poppies, because the drug trade in Afghanistan is what is driving and financing these terrorist networks. So we need agricultural specialists," he said.

So far, so good.

"But if we are sending them to Baghdad, they're not in Afghanistan," Obama said.

Iraq has many problems, but encouraging farmers to grow food instead of opium poppies isn't one of them. In Iraq, oil fields not poppy fields are a major source of U.S. technical assistance.

If the likely Democratic nominee for the Presidency of the United States has not yet learned that Afghans don't speak Arabic, then that should be the cause of widespread concern, nyet? Equally of concern is the Pavlovian tendency to attribute any problem in Afghanistan to the fact that we have a presence in Iraq. Don't have enough agricultural specialists? That's because they are in Iraq! Is the Afghan terrain too mountainous? It's because we are in Iraq! Does Kabul not have an attractive enough nightlife? Blame the quagmire in Iraq! If we are not already at that point, we will be soon.