Obama’s Afghan decision took Presidential courage in the face of feckless left-wing and right-wing opposition
By John Burke | Related entries in News
President Obama addresses the Cadet Corps and the nation at West Point
President Obama has made the right decision to commit 30,000 more Americans troops to the fight in Afghanistan — on top of the 20,000 additional troops he approved early this year – to “finish the job” of defeating al Qaeda and its essential ally, Mullah Omar’s Taliban. Obama said last year as a candidate that this is the “necessary war” and that he would finish it. He said the same again in the spring. And he said it again last night at West Point. With the two increases, Obama is more than doubling the number of U.S. combat brigades engaged in this fight — from three to eight. He is also ramping up a more aggressive U.S. strategy to deal with the Taliban sanctuaries inside the Pakistani tribal areas, where he has already greatly stepped up the tempo of CIA-led drone missile attacks. It’s hard to see what else Obama needs to do to demonstrate that he takes his Presidential responsibility for national security seriously.
It was also a courageous decision in light of the certain attacks it would draw — and has quickly drawn — from both the deeply pacifistic left wing of the his own party and the comically aggressive right wing of the GOP.
Interestingly, a good many of the attacks from both sides revolved around setting out a flexible 18-month for the new Afghan surge. Senate Democratic dove, Russ Feingold, found this wanting because it was not a strict deadline for withdrawal: “I do not support the president’s decision to send additional troops to fight a war in Afghanistan that is no longer in our national security interest. While I appreciate that the president made clear we won’t be in Afghanistan forever, I am disappointed by his decision not to offer a timetable for ending our military presence there.” Meanwhile, Senate Republican hawk, John McCain, undermined his standing as a national security guru by immediately leading a GOP attack on Obama over the time frame without even a feeble effort at demonstrating bipartisan unity behind a President making the hard choice to send young men and women to war: “Then it makes no sense for him to announce the date,” Mr. McCain retorted. In short, he said, “that gives the wrong impression to our friends, it’s the wrong impression to give our enemies.”
Beyond Capitol Hill, the attacks were far more intense — and almost stupefyingly simplistic and irresponsible. MoveOn.org is already pushing a petition to Congress to set a binding deadline for a U.S. withdrawal. Appearing on “Larry King Live” right after Obama’s speech, radical activist Michael Moore called the U.S. presence in Afghanistan “insane” and claimed pointlessly that “there is no al Qaeda in Afghanistan.” On the right, columnist Ralph Peters would win if there was a prize for the most hysterical nonsense for writing that Obama’s 18-month was a ” presidential declaration of surrender.” It’s a mystery to me how or why Peters, a former Army officer, thinks that adding the firepower of five Army and Marine combat brigades since last spring won’t have any effect on the Taliban, while Obama’s setting a target date to begin shifting security responsibility to the Afghans will lead inexorably to a U.S. defeat.
Obama’s policy formulation is strait forward, clear and compelling: This is a fight we did not ask for but must win for our own safety and security. It has gone on for a long time because we did not apply the necessary resources to it. We’re going to do that now. The Afghans and others must do their parts as well. It won’t take forever, and as President, I won’t let it.
I find it hard to take issue with any of that. Americans of every political persuasion should back the President. There will be more than enough time to find fault if he fails.
Cross-posted from The Purple Center
This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
December 2nd, 2009 at 6:41 pm
I don’t think there’s a job to finish, not a legitimate one at least. This will end up being a bigger failure of effort than even Iraq was.
December 2nd, 2009 at 6:51 pm
I think Obama decided to fish rather than cut bait. And we should not have just pulled out !
December 2nd, 2009 at 8:13 pm
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December 2nd, 2009 at 9:38 pm
If you’re an insurgency (them) fighting a traditional military force (us), if they/we announce a draw-down date, you/they go to ground until that draw-down date. This is a mystery?
December 2nd, 2009 at 9:51 pm
From what i’ve read, I don’t think it’s an insurgency.
December 2nd, 2009 at 10:04 pm
Chris Says:
And you could classify it as what? You think they’re out there fighting in regular divisions?
December 2nd, 2009 at 10:05 pm
Sorry, would classify it as what?
December 3rd, 2009 at 12:45 am
Simon: You win a prize for the most deliberately misleading use of an elipse. The portion of my post you deceptively exerpted sadi this:
“On the right, columnist Ralph Peters would win if there was a prize for the most hysterical nonsense for writing that Obama’s 18-month was a ” presidential declaration of surrender.” It’s a mystery to me how or why Peters, a former Army officer, thinks that adding the firepower of five Army and Marine combat brigades since last spring won’t have any effect on the Taliban, while Obama’s setting a target date to begin shifting security responsibility to the Afghans will lead inexorably to a U.S. defeat.”
The Taliban must fight the those eight combat brigades or lose. Yours is the facile argument being made by people of the left and right opposed to Obama’s move. Somehow magically, the Taliban, by virtue of being an “insurgency,” can “go to ground” for 18 months and reemerge when the Americans have left to take power. Of course, it’s nonsense to think that Obama’s 18-month timeframe means that US forces will suddenly all disappear in July 2011. But that aside, the Taliban is now on the offensive, winning over people or intimidating them by their presence, their power, their ruthlessness, and in the process, winning ground, village by village, district by district, province by province. To make this happen, they have created a substantial network of logistical and financial support, operating out of pakistan with al Qaeda’s help. They have lines of communications, a structure of command, and thousands of highly motivated fighting cadres spurred to action by effective propaganda.
In your formulation, they can just stop, fade into the woodwork, and hide for a year and a half while keeping intact the loyalty and support of their networks and fighters and continuing somehow to dominate the countryside without exercising power through force or persuasion. That’s a neat trick — especially in the face of a large opposing military force (which is also offering villagers security and a piece of prosperity).
This is simply silly. It’s the sort of argument that develops because people are mesmerized by the word “insurgency” and forget that an insurgent military force is still a military force or it is nothing. If the Taliban “goes to ground” for 18 months, the US and its allies will tightly control Afghanistan when they stick their heads up, period, end of story. The Taliban must fight or lose.
December 3rd, 2009 at 1:23 am
Deadlines don’t bother me. Worked with them for years. They focus the mind. They make people work to get things done. The more open-ended the commitment, the slower and less focused people work.
And when push comes to shove, deadlines are always flexible if they really need to be.
The real question we all need to be asking is “how much good can we really expect to do in Afghanistan?” It’s a torn up and culturally balkanized area that we look upon as a single nation at least in part as a matter of convenience or pretense. Everyone do themselves a favor and look at Afghanistan’s demographics. Now.
Further, they have very little sustaining economy. We can establish a better civil order over there, but who knows what resources will sustain it over the longer term? Or what collective spirit.
I look upon the setting of a timeframe, speaking of our own domestic problems and resource issues, and Obama’s eagerness to get other nations on board the burden-sharing train as serious clues. Clues that we’ll at minimum be looking for a transitional strategy come 2 years from now.
I know the party line of right wing hawks that we basically owe Afghanistan whatever it takes. This is sort of rich to me given how the Bush admin put the region on the back burner in favor of Iraq. Especially since there’s a pretty good chance that Afghanistan was put on the back burner by the Bush team because it was, comparatively speaking, a much tougher nut to crack than Iraq. Why didn’t we owe Afghanistan whatever it took 6 years ago?
On the spat above about whether the Taliban can hide or must fight..isn’t the truth in between? Of course we can beat these guys back with our resources. But we all know that radical extremist groups are fungal. If we could just soak the whole afghan in a bucket of bleach, the problem could be solved. But there’s no real-world analog to the bucket of bleach that’s morally acceptable.
We know we can do much good by beating extremist forces back and putting them on the defensive, but it’s unlikely we can substantially rid the area of these folks in 18 months or even 5 years. So there it is. Everyone face it.
December 3rd, 2009 at 9:40 am
The premise of the drawdown date is that Afghanistan, as a nation-state, needs to be able to begin handling its own security – to keep the Taliban from rebuilding after we’ve wrecked them over the course of a year and a half. (And if the Afghans are not ready to begin taking over by then, when will they be, and what would then be the point of staying any longer, at least militarily?) It’s not a free-for-all for the Taliban, even putting aside the fact that starting a draw-down, as John Burke noted, is not the same thing as leaving en masse.
Another thing to consider is that we can’t stay forever at the proposed troop levels, so it’s not as if the Taliban couldn’t play the same “lay low” game without the proposed (and conditional) date having been stated in the speech.
December 3rd, 2009 at 11:19 am
The more I think about it, though, the more I think the conditional draw-down date is a min being presented as a max. I think it means “we will not begin leaving any sonner than.”
December 3rd, 2009 at 11:20 am
President Obama said:
He can’t get much closer to President Bush’s statements about ending the Iraq war. “Conditions on the ground” mean it isn’t a strict time-table. And Secretary Gates has promised a review in December of 2010; if the strategy isn’t working, we’ll change it.
I have to give credit to the President. He is staying true to his promises during the campaign, he is listening to his generals … the ones who were successful in turning around the Iraq fiasco to a more tenable situation … while having absolutely nothing to gain from this politically. I was almost certain the rhetoric about Afghanistan being “the good war” was simply a ruse to contrast it to the Iraq war. But he evidently meant it, and I was wrong.
His base on the left, including the most energetic portion, are disheartened by this, with some calling him “Bush 3″. Michael Moore has said he has lost the “kids”. Some conservatives are seizing, irresponsibly, on the date in his speech rather than the context he clearly defines. The most partisan hacks on the right, like Sean Hannity, are acting distinctly un-patriotic in showing pictures of bored mid-shipmen during the speech and claiming he doesn’t have the support of the military.
This is America. Of course the military supports the commander in chief.
I have my doubts about a surge working in Afghanistan as it did in Iraq; we may find a partitioned Afghanistan or uber-federalist system works better there. Or we may have to let it slide into chaos, and periodically bomb the heck out of terrorist camps as they spring up. But Generals Patraeus and McChrystal are experienced in the COIN strategy, and they should be given the chance to salvage this shamefully ignored mission.
So, good on you, Mr. President. Let us hope and pray the strategy works, that General McChrystal’s implementation is able to turn the tide.
And if it works, I just hope General Patraeus is a Republican. He would make a good President some day.
December 3rd, 2009 at 12:14 pm
…showing pictures of bored mid-shipmen during the speech and claiming he doesn’t have the support of the military.
I’m guessing you meant cadets rather than midshipmen, unless midshipmen went up to West Point for the speech. Either way, my best friend from high school graduated from West Point and was joking on facebook about falling asleep during various entertainment events put on for the cadets while he was in school, things that almost no one would fall asleep during. Cadets are very sleep deprived, and most people who went to West Point and were being honest about it would tell you that it wouldn’t matter who was giving a speech or what the subject of that speech was. The cadets would be nodding off, regardless.
December 3rd, 2009 at 2:02 pm
@Frank and WHQ:
Right. Both the left and the right are IMo being unreasonable dicks about parts of this. The left is so eager to bail that they’ll pretend we have viable options to deal with the adverse consequences of that bailing in the future. And the right wants to lose their minds because we’ve sketched out a timetable for our efforts.
I wish more folks would educate themselves about insurgency and counterinsurgency. From Mao in WWII china up through Vietnam, insurgents honed their tactics to work against out conventional second generation warfare. They took notes on us, and they adapted, Especially by learning how to make modern politics part of the battle.
And now we’ve taken notes on them and adapted our strategies. “withdraw responsibly” is code for “don’t think you can just wait for us to go, we’re wise to that game now.”
It’s insulting to all of us for the right to suggest that Obama’s timeframe means that he’ll withdraw troops exactly when we’ve said we would even if at that time we think a little more delay will get us over the hump.
We’re taking the battle to insurgents in a much wiser way, focusing on civil order, building institutions, and making clear that our goal is to foster a stable independent nation that we can safely leave. If we make a good faith effort and deliver on those ideas in substantial ways, the insurgency WILL wither. Not die, but wither.
As previously stated, I have serious doubts about how much we can achieve in such a problematic place, but I support the effort that our President has chosen to undertake. Because he’s the one we elected to make the call, and because, well, you break it, you bought it.
FWIW, I find the left’s response a little harder to take. It’s not like the right doesn’t have a point about timeframes. They are just spinning it in a way to make folks question Obama’s competence. With the left, I don’t get a sense of any particular unified reason why they oppose this effort. And I think that’s because it really springs mostly from a visceral dislike of warfare.
I’m sympathetic to those on the left who oppose the surge because they share my skepticism about our odds of success, but I don’t think that’s the true basis of the majority of the opposition.
December 3rd, 2009 at 5:05 pm
WHQ – I stand corrected; it should have been cadets and not midshipmen. And your point about the fatigue the cadets experience is reasonable too.
I think there’s another thing at work here in regards to the tone and tenor of the speech. President Bush often conducted speeches in which he rallied the troops, and wanted boisterous responses, cheering conservatives but adding fuel to the fire of “warmonger” claims by the left. I suspect that President Obama, who has a more contemplative demeanor, wanted this speech to be perceived as one that is somber, with a kind of quiet determination. He certainly delivered it that way, with far less soaring rhetoric than he often uses.
December 3rd, 2009 at 10:37 pm
The Democrats that like Obama on everything except the war have legitimate plenty of reasons to think that escalating this war is a bad idea. Still, Obama is a liberal who doesn’t like war either, and he’s going forward. Don’t they think that there is something this brilliant president heard in his many months of briefings that made him think that pulling the troops out now would be worse than the course he is pursuing.
Obama also needs to prepare them for the fact that the troops probably won’t be leaving in 2011 as quickly as they want.
December 4th, 2009 at 12:08 am
@kk
On the left there’s always a fairly vocal pacifist group. Think Code Pink. They aren’t always the mainstream of the left — no serious candidate asked for Code Pink’s blessing during the 2008 primary — but they do exist.
And for the record I think they’re wrong on this one. the Taliban are fighting a two-front war, and one of those fronts happens to be in a nuclear-armed country. Abandoning the other front, so they can send thousands more fighters to Pakistan? Bad idea IMO.
I like Obama’s policy in Afghanistan. I have no idea whether 30,000 will be enough, but I do know that it’s never smart for a Superpower to put it’s prestige on the line in a war when it can use proxies like Karzai. So getting our troops out strikes me as a great idea. We just can’t do it too soon, we can’t do it today without disaster striking (possibly in the form of Pakistani nukes), and it would be a really good idea if we could strengthen the Afghan government more before we do.
@Simon
The problem with our effort in Afghanistan is that everybody thinks it’s our effort. It’s not. Occupiers don’t beat insurgencies without resorting to genocide. This war is (and always has been) the Afghani government’s war.
Hopefully with the extra combat troops we’ll be able to provide better security. Then the Afghani government will have an opportunity to win people’s loyalty. If that happens they’ll snitch on the Taliban in their area, and stop joining those Taliban fighters.
Otherwise the Taliban will almost certainly win.