Following President Obama’s Afghanistan policy address last night, the media prominently featured political strategists, U.S. lawmakers, foreign policy thinkers, and other domestic pundits to respond to the President’s strategy.

One group of people who has been largely left out of the media’s discourse following the speech has been the Afghans themselves, who will be most directly affected by the surge in troops. However, a handful of media outlets did document the reactions of some of the people in the region. Here are some examples:

Afghan Parliamentarians:

– “[Obama] may not be convincing the normal people or the Taliban, but by saying these things in the speech, this gives to the politicians…a free hand now. We are the ones…to win over our people,” said Khalid Pashtun, a member of Parliament from Kandahar.

– “It was a wonderful speech for America…but when it comes to strategy here in Afghanistan there was nothing new which was really disappointing,” said parliamentarian Shukriya Barakzai. “It seems to me that President Obama is very far away from the reality and truth in Afghanistan. His strategy was to pay lip-service, and did not focus on civilians, nation-building, democracy and human rights.”

– “People are starting to view the Americans as occupiers, and in that context more troops would be risky,” said Hanif Shah Hosseini, a parliamentarian from Khost province.

Afghan tribal leaders and government officials:

– “I don’t think we will be able to solve our problems with military force,” said Muhammad Qasim, a tribal elder from Kandahar. “We can solve them by providing jobs and development and by using local leaders to negotiate with the Taliban.”

– “When they increase the troops, the Taliban will respond by increasing their attacks on the foreigners — but that will not only be against the foreigners, it will be against Afghan civilians who live in the same area,” said Bershna Nadery, a woman who works in the Afghan Finance Ministry.

– “Eighteen months is a great opportunity,” said Afghan Foreign Minister Rangin Dadfar Spanta, praising Obama’s promise to begin drawing down troops in eighteen months. “Afghans must step up efforts to assume greater responsibility over the security of their country.”

Afghan citizens:

– “I welcome this decision, it’s a good decision. We need a larger number of foreign troops in order to eliminate the terrorists and win the war in Afghanistan,” said Fawad Habib, a student in Kabul.

– “If we get more troops, there will be more bloodshed,” responded shopkeeper Noor Muhammad. “Only Afghans themselves can solve this problem.”

– “Even if they bring the whole of America, they won’t be able to stabilize Afghanistan,” said Esmatullah, a young construction worker in Kabul. “Only Afghans understand our traditions, geography and way of life.”

– “One American soldier costs about $1 million a year,” said Jabar Wafaie, a security guard from Uruzgon Province working in Kabul. “The troops that are already here, they can do well now, if they wanted they could destroy the Taliban. … The additional 30,000 troops is going to be a good opportunity for the Taliban to recruit more.”

Additionally, Al Jazeera English was on the ground in Afghanistan yesterday and interviewed Afghans about their reactions to Obama’s speech. Watch it:

Asked to assess the sentiment amongst Afghans, a senior administration official told ThinkProgress the population is “overwhelmingly against the insurgency and the Taliban.” “What you see in Afghanistan is a desire for commitment and change,” the official added.

Rob Farley and I did a bloggingheads last night with some snap reactions to President Obama’s Afghanistan speech. In one segment, we discussed how, now that Obama has gone in with a troop increase that they favored, conservatives can be expected to go after the president’s announced withdrawal timeline.

Watch it:

Just as you can always count on Noam Chomsky to blame capitalism, you can always count on Sen. John McCain to advocate more war, more troops, and greater commitments. Literally minutes after the president’s speech ended, the Weekly Standard was pushing out McCain’s press release, full of the usual feel-tough, ersatz Churchillism — Success is the real exit strategy! — that sounds nice when delivered on the Senate floor but is, at the end of the day, as intellectually vacuous as it is strategically misguided.

It’s fair enough to note that convincing our Afghan allies that our resolve in helping them build up security and governance is solid, and I think the president’s speech did that. But we should also recognize that the “resolve” argument has two sides. It’s amazing to me that conservatives like McCain still seem unable to grasp that eliciting open-ended military interventions of the very sort that they endlessly advocate is, in fact, one of Al Qaeda’s stated tactic against the United States. In a mocking 2004 message, Osama bin Laden boasted “All that we have to do is to send two mujahedin to the farthest point East to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qa’ida in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human economic and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits to their private companies… So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.”

It is hugely important that the president has chosen not to play Al Qaeda’s larger game here, and to make clear to the Karzai government that, even though the U.S. is committed to securing their country from the Taliban, they don’t have a “blank check” — they have to do their part, and sooner rather than later. It remains to be seen, of course, exactly when and under what circumstances Obama will close the bank on on Karzai. Marc Lynch is right on in declaring the responsibility of skeptics of the policy to “hold the administration to its pledges to maintaining a clear time horizon and to avoiding the iron logic of serial escalations of a failing enterprise.” There’s no way of really knowing how much was lost in Iraq because of the Bush administration’s incomprehensible refusal use the leverage on the Maliki government that could have been generated by establishing a withdrawal timeline. We have neither the time nor the resources to replay that farce in Afghanistan, and I don’t see any benefit from pretending that we do.

Following President Obama’s speech last night, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) predictably hit the airwaves. On CBS immediately after the speech, McCain praised the decision to add more troops but said that setting a timetable was wrong because the only timetable should be victory:

MCCAIN: I don’t agree with an arbitrary date for withdrawal. Success is what dictates dates for withdrawal. If we don’t have that success and we only set an arbitrary date it emboldens our enemies and dispirits our friends.

Watch it:

McCain also reportedly pressed this point yesterday with the President during a briefing on the strategy. The claim that any exit strategy should be based on “victory” has become a consistent talking point on the right. But the major problem with this is not just that conservatives have no idea what victory looks like, it’s that they have already declared victory numerous times. To underscore McCain’s lack of credibility look at his past declarations:

- “Could I add, it was in Afghanistan, as well, there were many people who predicted that Afghanistan would not be a success. So far, it’s a remarkable success.” [CNN, 3/2/05]

- “Afghanistan, we don’t read about anymore, because it’s succeeded.” [Charlie Rose Show, 10/31/05]

- “Nobody in Afghanistan threatens the United States of America.” [Hannity & Colmes, 4/10/03]

- “The facts on the ground are we went to Afghanistan and we prevailed there.” [Wolf Blitzer Reports, 4/1/04]

Since the conditions on the ground clearly had no impact on McCain’s decision to proclaim “victory,” all the President really has to do to achieve victory in Afghanistan, based on McCain’s example, is to just arbitrarily say it.

Last night, Obama also made a veiled reference to McCain’s infamous statement that we could “muddle through” in Afghanistan. Obama explained that if he continued on the course left by the Bush administration, “this would simply maintain a status quo in which we muddle through, and permit a slow deterioration of conditions there.” Setting a timetable to begin redeploying forces is critical to preventing any such muddling, since as Larry Korb explained, “You can make it flexible but you need to have goals.”

Yesterday morning, former Bush adviser Karl Rove went on NBC’s Today Show and said that if President Obama decides to send 30,000-35,000 troops to Afghanistan, he would be “among the first to stand up and applaud.” Watch it:

Immediately after President Obama’s prime-time address last night — in which he announced that he would be deploying 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan — Rove went on Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor and responded. However, he definitely didn’t “stand up and applaud.” Instead, he and O’Reilly bashed the President for underperforming (although he acknowledged that the “core” of Obama’s message was acceptable). Some highlights of their comments:

– O’REILLY: I did not see a Winston Churchill-type performance. … Summing up, the president’s speech tonight was OK but not exactly the Gettysburg Address.

– ROVE: I mean, I think he might need a new teleprompter with some Energizer bunny batteries in it. You know, look, at the core of tonight was good news, but it was badly delivered in a — you know, in a weak frame.

– ROVE: And the enemy knows that we’re going to send one quarter less troops than was requested by the military commander. And then for him to say, In 18 months I’m going to start withdrawing those people. That says to me — that sends a very — very bad signal to the enemy that you can wait us out.

– O’REILLY: But, look, the problem with Barack Obama, I think, is becoming increasingly clear. Not even — not just on Afghanistan but on a whole — a whole other bunch of issues. He’s an academic. … Where is the table pounding?

Watch it:

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