Afghanistan: Will Obama change course?

President Obama is “plainly having serious second thoughts about Afghanistan,” said The Economist. He has called it “the necessary war,” insisting that the U.S. could not allow the resurgent Taliban to regain power and turn the country into a safe haven for al Qaida. So in March, Obama deployed 21,000 more troops, in the hope of stabilizing President Hamid Karzai’s shaky government. But now top U.S. commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal has warned that nation-building efforts are failing while the Taliban insurgency is growing, and that the West risks defeat without another 30,000 to 40,000 U.S. troops. McChrystal is asking Obama for a lot more than reinforcements, said Rajiv Chandrasekaran in The Washington Post. To win over the disaffected Afghan population, he wants a “comprehensive nation-building endeavor”—complete with ramped-up reconstruction efforts, reform of local government and the justice system, and the rooting out of corruption. Obama’s national security team is deeply divided over McChrystal’s recommendations, and after meeting with them this week, the president indicated it may be weeks before he makes a final decision.

“Why this sudden hesitation after so many months of resolute rhetoric?” asked Max Boot in the Los Angeles Times. Obama may be “panicking over falling public support for the war,” especially among liberal Democrats. Indeed, Vice President Joe Biden and some congressional Democrats are now lobbying for scaling back the war and bringing troops home. Their premise is that we can use special forces and high-tech weapons to target Taliban leaders and keep the insurgency at bay. But as Israel discovered in Gaza and Lebanon, trying to control terrorist insurgencies from afar doesn’t work. In battling insurgencies, half-measures never work. Obama’s instinct is to seek a middle course, said David Brooks in The New York Times, but there’s no compromise here. We either “surrender the place to the Taliban,” or go all-out to make it a functional nation.

That might take decades, said Frank Rich, also in the Times. August’s “blatantly corrupt, and arguably stolen, Afghanistan election ended any pretense that Karzai is a credible counter to the Taliban or a legitimate partner for America.” With U.S. casualties rising every month, the comparison to Vietnam is unavoidable. Generals always insist victory is possible if they could just get more troops. But you can’t create “a functioning nation” in a vast, “tribal narco-state of some 40,000 mostly rural villages.” As history has proved time and again, said Stephen Holmes in TheDailybeast.com, “turning an illegitimate government into a legitimate one is simply beyond the capacities of foreigners, however wealthy or militarily unmatched.”

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There’s another choice, said Fareed Zakaria in The Washington Post. Karzai’s government is failing because his fellow Pashtuns, who make up 45 percent of the population and 100 percent of the Taliban, are angry that he put Tajiks in charge of the army and security forces, and made deals with Uzbeks as well. So we have to co-opt the Pashtuns the same way the U.S. co-opted the Sunnis in Iraq—by “buying, renting, or bribing” them, and even cutting deals with some Taliban to lay down their arms. This cynical approach will almost certainly guarantee that Afghanistan will remain “poor, corrupt, and dysfunctional.” But it will also keep the country out of the hands of al Qaida and other Islamic extremists. In Afghanistan, that may have to count as a success.