KT McFarland Talks Afghanistan, Libya, and the Natural Third Topic, the Royal Wedding

Just back from Afghanistan, KT McFarland, a Fox News national security expert, waded through a different sort of minefield today as a guest on Imus in the Morning.  
 
It had been two years since McFarland last visited Afghanistan, and she returned from that trip feeling like the operation there was hopeless. “We didn’t have any idea what the mission was, we didn’t have the right forces,” she said. “I figured, get out while we can.”
 
This time, however, “I actually think General Petraeus does have a plan to succeed. The question is—should we be there, and is it worth it?”
 
It’s hard to think that anything would be worth the $2 billion a week the U.S. spends in Afghanistan, where McFarland believes an increase in troops has resulted in better organization among the more than 50 countries participating in the mission there.
 
“Two provinces in the south, where Afghanistan was run by the Taliban—those have pretty much cleared out,” she said. The plan now, she added, “is to start turning province by province by province over from Americans to Afghanistan.” Among the many obstacles to this arrangement is that 80 percent of the country is illiterate.
 
Regardless of any progress McFarland or others report, Imus maintains the following (admittedly ill-informed) positions on Afghanistan: “We will never change anything there. We will waste $2 billion a week until we decide to get out. A bunch of Americans will die for no reason. We will never find Osama Bin Laden.”
 
Surprisingly, McFarland didn’t dispute any of these notions, so long as President Obama is unwilling to commit combat troops until 2015, and maybe beyond; because, as Imus noted, the Taliban ain’t got nothing but time on its hands.
 
“The American public and the American President—they want to win the next news cycle,” Imus said. “The Afghans and the Taliban—they’ll wait 1,000 years.”
 
Which is a whole lot longer than McFarland’s daughter Camilla, a student at St. Andrews University in Scotland, will have to wait to meet her husband. According to school officials, 70 percent of students at St. Andrews, where Prince William and Kate Middleton met and fell in love, end up marrying one another.
 
Like Deirdre Imus, Lis Wiehl, and Martha MacCallum before her, McFarland is jacked up for next week’s royal wedding. She was decidedly less upbeat about the outlook in Libya, where there appears to be no goal.
 
“What are we doing—getting rid of Qaddafi? We’re going to be the rebel army? We’re going to get rid of the rebel army?” she wondered. “We don’t know what we’re doing, and if you don’t know what you’re doing it’s hard to know how to get there.”
 
General Muammar Qaddafi, Libya’s longtime leader, is holding onto his more than 30-year reign, McFarland observed, by figuring out the “checkmate” move on the U.S. and its allies. “He’s using human shields,” she said. “He’s put his stuff where there’s civilians, knowing we won’t bomb and we won’t come get them.”
 
So, she concluded, “Checkmate, stalemate, he wins.”
 
Um, can we go back to talking about the royal wedding?
 
-Julie Kanfer