Barack Obama may not have started the war in Afghanistan, said Michael Crowley in The New Republic, but that doesn’t mean it can’t become the quagmire that defines his presidency. For years, the president-elect and his fellow Democrats have been contrasting our “righteous fight” against the Taliban and al Qaida with the “moral and strategic catastrophe” unfolding in Iraq, coupling every “call for withdrawal from Iraq with a call for escalation in Afghanistan.” Now, however, with Afghanistan’s Westernized leader, Hamid Karzai, barely clinging to power, and with most of the country controlled by the resurgent Taliban and at least 13 other Islamic insurgent groups, Obama may be wondering if Afghanistan is the “good war” he thought it was.
At the very least, said Robert Dreyfuss in The Nation, Obama will have to rethink his campaign pledge to send two or three additional combat brigades to Afghanistan. To restore even a modicum of stability, experts say, the U.S. and NATO will have to send an additional 200,000 troops. Then, if Obama wants to honor his promise to “crush al Qaida” and find Osama bin Laden, he’ll have to mount raids into nuclear-armed Pakistan, where the situation “is only slightly less dire than in Afghanistan.” And since Obama has pledged not to practice Bush-like unilateralism, said Lakhdar Brahimi in The Washington Post, he’ll need to get any plan pre-approved by the Afghan government, our NATO allies, and the U.N. Security Council. “It will not be easy for so many to agree on a meaningful strategy.”
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