Afghanistan: Does Obama’s strategy make sense?

Finally, we have “a sound and feasible strategy in Afghanistan,” said Frederick Kagan and William Kristol in The Weekly Standard. President Obama has given Gen. Stanley McChrystal the 30,000 new troops he needs to roll back the Taliban and defeat al Qaida. Obama’s decision, announced in a speech last week, was “not flawless”—he shouldn’t have announced that he’d begin to withdraw U.S. troops in July 2011. But with this, his second infusion of troops this year, he will “double” our forces in Afghanistan, enabling us to regain the initiative. This is Obama’s “surge,” said Fred Hiatt in The Washington Post. While not an exact copy of Bush’s last-ditch gambit in Iraq, it has similar elements, including a counterinsurgency campaign aimed at winning popular support and the establishment of clear benchmarks for the Afghan government. “You can’t assume that what worked in Iraq will work in Afghanistan,” but in Iraq, the U.S. demonstrated that “forceful, strategic intervention” can turn what seemed like certain defeat into success.

Some success, said Andrew Bacevich in the Los Angeles Times. George W. Bush invaded Iraq in pursuit of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, and squandered hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives to turn a dictatorship into a chaotic land of daily violence and unresolved ethnic and religious divisions. After that disaster, Obama was elected to “reset America’s approach to the world.” Instead, he’s succumbed to the same “illusion” that the U.S. can subdue a borderless, global jihad by “fixing” one desperate, failed state. In Afghanistan, the government we’ve chosen to save, at the cost of more American dead and wounded, is incompetent and corrupt. Even if our troops succeed in shutting down some terrorist enclaves, they will simply reappear in Pakistan, Somalia, or elsewhere. “Under the guise of cleaning up Bush’s mess,” Obama has tragically expanded it.

What choice did he have? said Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker. To withdraw from Afghanistan would risk a “Pentagon revolt,” an Islamist resurgence in the region, and make Obama vulnerable to a “politically lethal scapegoating” in the event of a terrorist attack at home. Waging a full-scale counterinsurgency is beyond our financial means and political will. So by “a dismal process of elimination,” a short-term surge designed to “deliver a hard punch to the Taliban” was Obama’s only viable option. Note that Obama has made no Bush-like vows to vanquish evil and make the world’s hellholes safe for Western-style democracy. Obama has a much narrower goal, said Joe Conason in Salon.com. By knocking the more aggressive insurgents back on their heels, he’s hoping to convince less hard-core elements of the Taliban to negotiate. By working with local tribes, we may be able to seduce opponents into striking a deal with the Karzai government in Kabul, creating enough stability to permit a U.S. withdrawal. Obama has pointedly said his goal is to reverse the Taliban’s “momentum,” not to achieve “victory.”

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I noticed that—and so did the enemy, said Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post. You don’t win wars by holding a white flag and announcing your future retreat. Does Obama “think that such ambivalence is not heard by the Taliban,” which possesses the patience and fortitude he lacks, or by “Afghan peasants deciding which side to choose?” Obama has proposed not a war strategy for Afghanistan but a political strategy for domestic audiences—placating the Right with more troops and the Left with a promise of withdrawal in 2011. Through his cynicism, he has guaranteed defeat. No army can “prevail without a commander in chief committed to success.”

It depends on how you define success, said Ronald Brownstein in NationalJournal.com. During the Cold War, there was a national consensus on strategy and goals, but today, America “still faces jagged divisions” over how best to confront Islamic extremism. The Right insists on all-out, global war, “enhanced interrogation,” and aggressive domestic surveillance programs. The Left is clamoring to bring the troops home, and contends that it’s counterproductive to erode America’s ideals to combat a ruthless enemy. Obama has rejected the “absolutism” of both sides, and is seeking a middle path that can engender consensus for a long, hard struggle. “If that synthesis produces greater stability in Afghanistan and security at home,” he will go down in history as a brilliant tactician. If it doesn’t, history will say he failed by “timidly hedging his bets.”