Afghanistan Issues
I wrote a fairly long piece about the Afghanistan war a few months ago. But now that the President has committed 30,000 troops for an additional two year period, it's worth a quick review. It can be called the responsible decision. Were we to leave now, you couldn't expect people in the region to respect it even if it gave them a freer hand
Afghanistan and Pakistan Rattled by Plan for Drawdown - NYTimes.com. Or that we should expect that nothing about leaving things as they are will ever come back to bite us. The U S spent nearly a decade talking up various commitments and objectives, took responsibility for entire nations on itself. It is unintelligible to say it was about nothing now. Even if the unfolding of action and consequence offers little clue now to what it might have been about then. President Obama took his prerogative to set parameters and then follow the subsequent policy of wisely heeding professional advice. There appeared to be several plans with different approaches from 10 through 50,000 additional troops. 30,000 being the middle bracket Goldilocks choice. The primary danger here is of believing in automatic efficacy of escalation. call it surge reductionism, magic surging
Afghanistan - Obama's surge: Has the president been misled by the Iraq analogy? - Salon.com. The Iraq surge was special case of escalation, particularly tailored to events in Baghdad city, aided providentially by events happening in parallel elsewhere: The Sunni awakening, now being followed by a Sunni door closing as the Shia'a government now disarms those same Sunni militia's. As well the Madi stand-down, a Shi'ite force not integrated into Maliki's government, without whose tacit acceptance there would be no Iraqi government. Behind all this, the severe balkanization of Iraq into separate ethic and tribal enclaves. However; Iraq owns its own civil wars now. Escalation in Afghanistan opens a window of opportunity narrowly. Initially it gives us situational momentum. it takes operational freedom of the Taliban away. It gives the provisional Afghan government the ability to insulate populations and routines of business and governance from violence. After a certain period; though, it becomes a grievance driver and a force multiplier for insurgency. The longer the war continues the more removed the U.S population becomes, even one disposed towards a war against al Qeada. With long-war strategies, conduct of the war depends heavily on the public will. Always the critical question is "what are we trying to accomplish here?" To extricate ourselves from a war leaving less chaos than when we started and with a less-than critical mass of individuals believing we have stolen unprovidentially their self-determination, some indistinct destiny of theirs. What we want are 30,000 round trip tickets. The best part of a good faith effort, is convincing others of the legitimacy of your own interests.
Afghanistan is not critical national security. Maintaining that it is is part of the criticism from the right. Critical to the extent it was part of their fantasy to remake the middle east into a different world with a couple of grande strokes. This was the imperial madness of the last administration. The neo-conservatives claimed they had conquered Afghanistan three weeks into their war. Something they trumpeted that neither the British Empire nor Alexander the Great had done - but that they had. This tells you what you need to know about this lot - ridiculous little men and their preposterous cant. They saw themselves slipping easily into the seat of empire. It wasn't real. We haven't and aren't going to do what the Afghani's have never done for themselves; unify under a single cohesive government. Nor is it necessary for our purposes. Degrading militant Islamist groups capabilities is our purpose. With the Taliban leverage of proximity comes into play. Pakistan and other regional powers can affect these matters with fewer resources than we can. Our best use of resources becomes convincing them we want the same outcomes. Even if that means taking our stamp of ownership off these struggles. Again with some that means giving up winning their wars, a triumphal procession postponed. A less-than-national security consideration.
A Senator interviewed on NPR the other day, being pressed on the costs of the Afghan war responded with "what price freedom" the most blithe most trite thing he could say offhand. A trillion dollars and nuclear Pakistan's stability could be the price of Afghan obsession. One of the hidden dangers of little wars is their absorbent quality
U.S. Envoy Urges Caution on Forces for Afghanistan - NYTimes.com. Much of the criticism from the right seems a little artificial. What advantage was there to trying to rush the process or discussion
Mullen: Obama has time to make decision on Afghanistan troops | csmonitor.com? Pushing a false immediacy betrayed more the tactics of political harassment of the President and his party than concern for the Afghanis
House Dems' Afghan anxieties - John Bresnahan - POLITICO.com.
Criticism from the left is equally dubious. What ever the initial rational for the war, seeing a foreign intervention through to some sort of conclusion is critical to understanding the true costs of a war and keeping them in sight. Leaving when it gets tiresome or costly runs a danger of validating the cut-n-run gamblers who start these wars, who would like nothing more than the concept of endeavors they can walk away from if they don't pay off. The left doesn't like the idea of vaguely denoted exit strategies any more than the right Obama speech: kicking the can down the road in Afghanistan | csmonitor.com. Though, it is the vagueness with the former and the denotation with the latter.
Obama's War Speech Wins Over Some Skeptics - NYTimes.com The way this appears to work is that resources go in now
Obama to let Pentagon deploy even more troops, but numbers remain murky - washingtonpost.com. Eighteen months from now is not a deadline, but that is when the resources begin to come back out. I don't regard the Obama administration as paragons of the progressive, but I regard them as a capable and centrist administration, which was their real charge. More than a little change is realized by simply easing the straining at the leash -- towards the security state national corporatism that exists in conservative dreams. A president who wants to succeed and lead, knows what an election result in the percentage points lying alongside the median means, and what it doesn't. From the left and right there are always those who believe they see in every election victory a landslide, in every landslide a revolution, and in every new administration a disparate sweet despotism of executive fiat. People like Dick Cheney wear their absurdity proudly, casting foreign policy in terms of childlike 'toughness' as he has in recent speeches, but posturing tough means nothing to people who can count. They know how many soldiers and sailors we have. How many ships and tanks, how many jets and transports. How much capacity for construction and reconstruction. How much wealth to spare. Through the middle east they have a good idea what we can accomplish with all these. We want them to know (to a degree) so they don't guess wrong. But they also know when tenacity turns into bullshit. A Pew Trust poll came out recently showing that isolationist opinion is at a forty year high among Americans - the poll was comparing the opinion of the general population to those of Council on Foreign Relations members. Conditions are returning to normal a Multi polar world with a brief false uni-polar moment over
U.S. Seen as Less Important, China as More Powerful: Overview - Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Our economic and military primacy challenged, our moral authority and leadership deeply questioned, a generation of Americans turns away. Globalism remains.
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