An interview with retired Maj. Gen. Sid Shachnow, in the December 4 ThePilot.com, an online newspaper serving the area around Southern Pines, North Carolina. General Shachnow has a good, measured take on the situation in Afghanistan and the Obama speech rolling out the new plan.
President Obama’s new plan for Afghanistan is a complex strategy for a complicated war, in the view of one retired general who lives in Southern Pines.
Retired Major Gen. Sid Shachnow said Thursday that he gives it a grade of 65 percent.
“It is a tough time to be president,” Shachnow said. “It is a tough time to be a soldier. It is a complicated war, but you have to accept things as they are, not as you would like them to be. Whether we should be there or not, we are there, and things are not going well for us.”
As a boy, Shachnow escaped a Nazi concentration camp in his native Lithuania and fled with his family to the United States. He learned English, joined the Army, and rose through the ranks to become a Green Beret soldier and eventually command the Special Forces school at Fort Bragg.
Now Shachnow teaches future generals from time to time at the Army’s Command and General Staff College and pitches in raising money to help badly wounded veterans make the tough transition to civilian life through the Senti-nels of Freedom program.
Shachnow sees the country in a difficult situation now as a result of poor military decisions in the past.
“Because our strategy was flawed,” he said, “you can’t fight counterinsurgency on the cheap. You can’t do that.”
Obama’s plan calls for an immediate 30,000 troop surge with added support to come from allied nations training Afghan police and military to take over following U.S. withdrawal in 2011.
Shachnow said he likes some of that plan, but is not happy about a publicly announced end date.
“The president had to take into account political and foreign policy factors,” the general said. “He came up with sort of a 65 percent solution. I didn’t like the idea that he announced a withdrawal date. Of course, there is a little waffling going on with his saying we will ‘take into account’ the situation at the time.”
