Former Vice President Dick Cheney says that the Obama administration should stop blaming the Bush administration for failures in Afghanistan and that its indecision over a war strategy is endangering U.S. troops.
“Half-measures keep you half-exposed,” Mr. Cheney said during a speech Wednesday night at the Center for Security Policy in Washington. “It’s time for President Obama to do what it takes to win a war that he has repeatedly and rightly called a war of necessity… . It’s easier to blame the Bush administration than support our troops.”
Mr. Obama has yet to respond to a reported request last month by Gen. Stanley McCrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, for 40,000 additional troops to supplement the 68,000 already on the ground.
Mr. Cheney said such indecision “hurts our allies and emboldens our adversaries.”
“Waffling while our troops on the ground face an emboldened enemy endangers them and hurts our cause,” he said.
Mr. Cheney’s comments were the most recent in his criticism of the Obama administration and a direct response to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s statement Sunday that a new strategy had to be crafted because the Bush administration left questions unanswered and the war adrift.
Mr. Cheney said his administration “dug into every aspect of Afghanistan.” He also said Bush officials gave Mr. Obama’s transition team a policy review of the Afghan war, then were asked not to disclose the fact.
“We agreed, giving them the benefit of our work and the benefit of the doubt,” Mr. Cheney said.
He also said the strategy Mr. Obama announced in March has a “striking resemblance” to the Bush administration review.
Mr. Cheney has been most critical of the Obama administration’s attack on the CIA’s advanced-interrogation techniques under President Bush. On Wednesday night, he delivered some of his sharpest comments.
“The last time President Obama spoke on this issue, he adopted vague and useless platitudes,” Mr. Cheney said. “He judged the evidence as unwelcome and disregarded it.”
He said after interrogating Guantanamo Bay detainee and suspected al Qaeda leader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, “he was not only talking, he was conducting seminars.”
“He had a professorial side, and our guys didn’t mind if his classes ran long,” Mr. Cheney said.
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