Senator McCain is almost certainly right about Afghanistan.
One of the reasons I haven’t been too harsh with President Obama has been that I actually agree with a good chunk of his domestic agenda, but also on foreign policy he has appeared from the beginning to basically be following almost all the same policies as his predecessor–and I view that as a very good thing. Afghanistan and Iraq are vital to our national interest, and to humanity’s interest, and abandoning them would be criminal.
But now I’m increasingly worried the President’s about to practically bug out of Afghanistan, and that would be the gravest of errors. A travesty of global proportions. If the man hasn’t the spine to do what’s right and to continue the long hard slog that smart people always knew Afghanistan would be, then, he’ll be a President I am ashamed of.
(You righties who want to tell me I should already be ashamed of him because of your own list of pet issues can just shut up. If you can’t restrict your comments to the issue of Afghanistan and the war in general, I’m deleting your comments on sight, maybe even your comment account. I fracking mean it: the subject is Afghanistan. I will take it as a personal affront if you try to drag in other B.S.)
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The reason Bush was so unpopular at the end is because everyone had a real good reason to be unhappy with him, even if they weren’t the same reasons along the left/libertarian/right spectrum. Obama is ending up in the same spot, and your particular reason is Afghanistan.
Bush was already fumbling Afghanistan. The strategy was not being updated to meet changing conditions. Obama never understood why things were the way they were to start with, and therefore had no hope of picking up and moving them along the same direction.
The history behind all this is rather evident and clear for those that choose to search: Team Obama-Biden-Gates are not acting well.
General David McKiernan was appointed Afghan Commander by Pres. Bush. He requested 30,000 additional troops for what he warned was going to be a tough 12 months. He received via Obama approximately 15,000 plus additional troops of 5,000 “who would not have a combat role but instead ARE to train Afghan forces.”
Enter President Obama — Secretary Gates fires General Mc Kiernan after 11 months. And he was a perfectly good General — for our side.
Gates tells reporters:
“Our mission there requires NEW thinking and NEW approaches by our military leaders.” Asked for a specific reason why McKiernan was being removed, Gates said: “Nothing went wrong and there was nothing specific.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/11/us-general-sacked-afghanistan
Re-enter Obama — Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal takes over command post Afghanistan —-for presumably new thinking and new approaches.
August 2009 —McChrystal presents new strategy and submits request for 45,000 additional troops. He doesn’t get them. No surprise there.
“Adding to the frustration, according to officials in Kabul and Washington, are White House and Pentagon directives made over the last six weeks that Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, not submit his request for as many as 45,000 additional troops because the administration ISN’T ready for it.”
http://www.longwarjournal.org/threat-matrix/archives/2009/09/mcchrystal_to_resign_if_not_gi.php
October 2009 — White House (really) angry at General Stanley McChrystal speech on Afghanistan:
“An adviser to the administration said: “People aren’t sure whether McChrystal is being naïve or an upstart. To my mind he doesn’t seem ready for this Washington hard-ball and is just speaking his mind too plainly.”
“In London, Gen McChrystal, who heads the 68,000 US troops in Afghanistan as well as the 100,000 Nato forces, flatly rejected proposals to switch to a strategy more reliant on drone missile strikes and special forces operations against al-Qaeda. He told the Institute of International and Strategic Studies that the formula, which is favoured by Vice-President Joe Biden, would lead to “Chaos-istan”.
October 8, 2009 Military growing impatient with Obama on Afghanistan
Question:
What exactly is the Obama-Biden-Gates strategy ?
So, you get to say how you approve of Obama’s domestic policies and then threaten to ban anyone who dares mention anything but Afghanistan….
Well, it’s your site. I guess you have to do what you have to do to make your positions defensible.
As far as Afghanistan is concerned, Gee, didn’t Obama just last month tell the VFW that Afghanistan was the war we “must win?” Hasn’t he been telling us that for three years? Wasn’t his big political breakthrough all about how Bush was pursuing the “wrong” war in Iraq while the “right war” was in Afghanistan? Didn’t he promise to focus his every waking hour to finding Bin Laden?
Gee, and here I’ve been thinking that Obama is nothing but a lying, partisan, opportunistic Chicago style thug.
Guess that just makes me…. right.
I’ve kept hoping he’d at least do the right thing on Afghanistan.
I suspect he’s really just not that into things like success and victory…
unless they’re his personally.
Thank you, Dean.
(see below)
McK: yeah, and I just cleared it. Problem solved. What seems to happen with the anti-Spambots is that if you include a link in your comments (which you should feel free to do at any time by the way, I have no objections) is that the ‘bots automatically flag it and hold it. I may agree or disagree with your comment, but I released it because I know you’re not a spammer offering links just to spam. It’s there now, for all to see.
Leaving aside the fact that non-related Obama positions inform us as to his Afghanistan-related behaviour, I will endeavour to obey our host’s diktat, and say only this:
All Obama promises come with an expiry date.
Alllllllll right, I’m starting to see it. And I’m starting to see what I really need to do here on Dean’s World. I’m still working on a formal policy, but one is about to come down. I don’t care if you like it or not, there’s a reason it’s called “Dean’s World.”
This goes back to something that was going on the last 5+ years on Dean’s World, which was, that any time we started to discuss what America should do in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or anywhere else, someone somewhere tried to turn the discussion into their own personal Jihad against George W. Bush.
And you know what? Do you know why Aziz is still a front-page contributor? Because regardless of whether I agreed with him or not, Aziz makes his central arguments (most of the time) about what he thinks is the POLICY we should be following as a nation. He could say good things or bad things about the current administration’s policies, but he always (well, almost always) made it about POLICY he thought should be followed.
I actually disagreed with him much of the time. Still do. But the man continues to make it about POLICY, not the current temporary occupant of the White House.
So does Trudy Schuett. So did Mary Madigan (which is why I still miss her on the front page). So do, actually, most of the front page contributors. For most, they make it about what POLICY they think should be followed, not the current temporary office-holders.
I’m actually cogitating on this, but I think I’m about to announce a new editorial policy based on this. My currently-fuzzy but increasingly firmed-up policy is looking something like this:
“If you can’t stop making it about the current temporary occupants of this or that political office, and can’t talk about what you think the proper POLICY should be, then I don’t want to hear what you have to say.”
I actually booted off a personal friend from this blog a few years ago, because he could not, in any discussion, stop talking Bush, Bush, Bush. Whom he hated. He could not stop himself from talking, in EVERY discussion, about how Bush was fucking up the country and the world, and lying, and cheating, and otherwise being stupid and fucking everything up (Bush was the Stupid Evil Genius Who Was Fucking Everything Up). If the President was even tangentially related, guys like this could not stop calling Bush a “liar or a dope.” It was ludicrous. Conversations got derailed right and left, just so we could tell everybody what a fucker and failure George Bush was. I couldn’t stand it, I wanted to talk about ideas and proposals, and they couldn’t stop turning every conversation into “why Bush is evil.”
You guys on the right are now doing the same goddamned thing, and I think it’s mind-poison. I really do. I voted Dole in 1996. I voted Bush in 2000. I voted for Bush again in 2004. No regrets. But you people are making me fucking crazy: everything, always, is about the current temporary occupant of the White House?
When I say this blog is about “defending the liberal tradition,” I do not have some namby-pamby “all voices must be heard” bullshit mentality. I don’t. I never have. I am not providing a free platform to anyone who wants to rant about whatever they want. No, it’s about IDEAS. I may not like your ideas, but at least you’re presenting ideas.
I’m really getting tired of this. Like, when we addressed the issue of Islam, people challenged me to find an anti-terrorist, pro-American Muslim. I did. Not good enough. The guy must just be a liar with an agenda.
I challenged the anti-Bushies to stop fucking obsessing on Bush, and to start talking about ideas, about policies we should be pursuing INSTEAD of whatever we were doing, and they couldn’t fucking do it. For them, it was All Bush, All The Time.
Now I’m seeing that in the Obama era. You guys can’t talk ideas. You can’t talk about what we SHOULD be doing in Afghanistan, and the very thorny problem that it is (and has been for centuries). No, for some of you guys, it’s All-Obama-All-The-Time.
I’m not saying bringing up the current administration’s policies is out of bounds. Indeed, I’m totally following Senator McCain’s statement. Let me quote it:
“I think the great danger now is a half-measure, sort of a — you know, try to please all ends of the political spectrum,” McCain told CNN chief national correspondent John King. “And, again, I have great sympathy for the president, making the toughest decisions that presidents have to make, but I think he needs to use deliberate speed.”
I know some of you can’t stand McCain, but this is part of why I voted for him: he’s not obsessed with how he dislikes the current temporary occupant of the White House. He gets it. If every conversation devolves to why the current President is either an idiot or a monster, then you have no conversation at all.
Senator McCain has it completely correct. If you aren’t talking about IDEAS, about WHAT WE SHOULD BE DOING vs. WHAT WE ARE DOING, then you’re just masturbating to your anti-Presidential porn. You really are.
If you can’t talk about what we should be doing in Afghanistan, and instead want to talk about how Obama is fucking up in Afghanistan, you’re not serious-minded. You aren’t. Because you want to make it about Obama, not about what we really should be doing as a nation.
This is serious shit. We are in the middle of Afghanistan right now, with our boys and girls fighting and dying there. And trying to figure out what to do while they’re there. Don’t tell me I don’t get it, I KNOW people there. Americans who fought there, and also, actual Afghans. Indeed, I recently helped an Afghan woman living near Kabul to get a business loan–for a paltry sum of about $5,000 by the way–because she wanted to expand her business teaching women how to sew clothing and sell them on the foreign market.
She got the loan by the way. I helped her fill it out. Yes, over the Internet. And it’s not about me. I’m talking to and interacting with actual Afghans in Afghanistan. And all you assholes want to do is talk about Obama.
I want to talk about Afghanistan and what we need to do there. You want to talk about how Obama is either evil or stupid. I can’t stand it anymore.
Dean,
I don’t really give a rat’s ass about Obama as such; he’s not an interesting topic of discussion. But why in a post about Afghanistan did you bring up his domestic policy, and how you agree with it? If you want particular results (which you seem to), you should consider how your actions are likely to promote or inhibit those results. In particular, voicing an opinion in a short post about an off-topic is not likely to concentrate discussion on that topic. (And in this case, the fact that your greatest passion was about the nature of comments virtually guaranteed that comments would be about that.)
At some point, you need to ask yourself whether venting or achieving the results that you want is more important to you. Either is fine, but right now you’re sabotaging yourself and getting frustrated.
Anyhow, isn’t Afghanistan rather simple? My impression is that so long as we pursue our anti-drug policy, any other goals we have are doomed to failure. Since we’re effectively unable to abandon our anti-drug policy (much to our national shame), wouldn’t it make sense to pull our troops out so as not to waste their lives, and just give guns and money to the least bad warlords? (Perhaps also establishing a more country-like area about Kabul and other major cities?)
Given that we’re addicted to our asinine anti-drug policies, what other realistic choices are there?
Dean:
The fact that you think my criticisms of Obama are remotely comparable to the rabid derangement that lefties spewed about Bush says a lot more about you than it says about me.
As far as this particular subject is concerned, it is frankly IMPOSSIBLE to discuss Obama’s Afghanistan policy without talking about his domestic policy because his upcoming likely reversal on Afghanistan is ALL ABOUT keeping his precious social-democrat domestic policies from dying on the vine.
See, Obama saw what happened to Bush, because he was a big PART of what happened to Bush. Bush’s enemies were able to totally destroy Bush as a political figure by making EVERYTHING about Iraq, and the more unpopular the war in Iraq became, the more Democrats were able to run the clock out on Bush’s OTHER policies.
Obama is many things (most of them things I don’t like) but a fool is not one of them. Obama knows that he OWNS Afghanistan, and he also KNOWS that if the war goes south and takes his popularity with him, then his domestic policy agenda is toast.
So he is wrestling now with whether or not to abandon an entire NATION to thugs, zealots and terrorists, in order to salvage his domestic agenda.
And you think he is likely to do so, while simultaneously SUPPORTING that domestic agenda. An agenda that has already given us the highest deficits in our history and is likely to bring massive unemployment, endless deficits, greatly reduced military focus and a lower standard of living for your children and grandchildren.
Great, glad you support it. Hope you realize that if Obama does abandon Afghanistan, it’s to give you all those wonderful domestic programs you support so much.
I hope I’ve made clear in my comment number # 2 above, my alliance with the policy that the current and previous Commander of US Forces in Afghanistan — have enunciated in news media, i.e. requesting DOD for more troops.
Dean,
Also, it’s not necessarily legitimate to separate domestic policy from foreign policy: there are 45 million uninsured people in the US, and only 28 million people of any kind in Afghanistan. Shouldn’t we spend money on getting our own people health care first, since there are so many more of them? What about all of the millions of Americans who don’t have jobs? Obama didn’t invade Afghanistan, so why should he be responsible for fixing it? Isn’t that now Bush’s responsibility? Shouldn’t he go over and personally fix the country himself?
ctl,
Your comment is so divergent from my own experience of reality that I can’t even relate to it.
In case you don’t remember, the Taliban worked hand in hand with and gave sponsorship to people who engaged in acts of war against us.
Maybe you’re willing to let that slide. I don’t think that works, though.
All the money for domestic agendas comes to a screeching halt if we allow ourselves to be attacked by anyone with a delusion of grandeur.
Trying to treat acts of war as a health care problem makes even less sense than trying to treat it as a law enforcement problem.
Dish:
I completely agree with you. Good luck getting Obama/Reid/Pelosi to see it that way. Recognition of an active and significant threat to our nation is directly contradictory to their personal and political goals.
Like Dean, I’m waiting to see what Obama does on this. Does he have any principles whatsoever, or will he abandon Afghanistan to the barbarians while simultaneously accepting the risk of another (likely much larger) attack on American soil again in order to keep their political goals in sight?
That’s the whole questions, when you get right down to it. And his decision on Afghanistan will show whether he is wholly committed to the complete restructuring of the American economy no matter the cost, or if he is willing to compromise on his pure (social democratic) goals by accepting some need to project American power to prevent another 9/11.
It’s really that simple. I hope he makes the right call, but like Dean, I fear he won’t.
This is very similar to the choice Clinton had in 1994. He chose a centrist, modest Hegemonic approach with America still a dominant superpower in the world, and that’s the main reason I say he chose to govern as a center-right President. This is one reason I defended Clinton then, he made the RIGHT choice to keep America strong, and to promote the right traditional American values (barring abortion, of course).
I don’t see Obama making the Clinton decision, and the result will be a reduction in American power, prestige and a rise of China/India/Europe as “super powers” while the USA declines.
Which is what I’ve been warning about for months.
Obama simply can’t achieve his social-democrat goals and have the USA remain a dominant superpower. It’s simply not possible to do both.
Dishman,
Yes, the Taliban worked with Al Qaeda to attack us many years ago. What of that now? And what does that have to do with trying to build a viable unified modern nation in Afghanistan? I don’t think that the modern taliban is likely to help Al Qaeda take over more airplanes and crash them into sky scrapers. Are you suggesting that more American blood and treasure should be spilled while Americans go without affordable health insurance out of a sense of vengeance?
Oh, and one more thing, a RELEVANT thing. If Obama does reverse his direction on Afghanistan that proves that all his talk about the importance of Afghanistan and how Bush was evil for pursuing the “wrong” war in Iraq while the “right” war was in Afghanistan was pure political posturing, nothing more nothing less.
I have another word for such partisan, cynical political posturing.
I call it a lie.
ctl:
Thank you for providing the PERFECT demonstration of a return to pre-9/11 thinking. That was absolutely wonderful. No doubt you will (again) be one of the most shocked and disturbed by the next attacks.
CC,
But if we have universal health care, stop emitting CO2, and don’t have a republican president, no one will have a reason to attack us again.
ctl:
I have to suppose you are being facetious because it can’t be possible to believe what you just wrote and be able to find your mouth with a fork without poking your own eye out.
CC,
I’d prefer to all it Devil’s Advocate.
(But an argument doesn’t cease to be valid merely because the person making it doesn’t believe in it.)
ctl:
No it “ceases to be valid” because it’s downright idiotic in the first place. But since you were “devil’s advocating” I assume you realized that as you typed it.
Getting back to the post:
CC touched on it, but it was in passing. You’ve lamented that everything was about Bush for the last nine years, and the issues fell by the wayside. I think that this is a direct offshoot of that.
Obama doesn’t have an Afghanistan plan. He never did. He simply had the “Not Bush” plan. Afghanistan was important because Bush said Iraq was important. We needed more troops in Afghanistan because Bush said we didn’t. That was the extent of it. And now we have the fruits of that.
You have a problem with where we might be because of the right side focusing too much on the President. Fine. What we have now is where we have already arrived because of the left side focusing too much on the Bush. We’ve been given a hell of a lesson on the right — harp on the president in the most hateful and deceitful ways and destroy America in your own image, or your opponents will certainly destroy it in theirs. How can we not expect the People on the right to not see it and eventually accept it?
The entire country has been put into a prisoner’s dilemma, and we know that one side will continue to betray time after time. You want to change the equation? Convince the one that is already betraying before both start.
“The entire country has been put into a prisoner’s dilemma, and we know that one side will continue to betray time after time. You want to change the equation? Convince the one that is already betraying before both start.”
I’ve been meaning to address exactly this.
The only way we can get the Democrat party to stop using tactics that are destroying this country is to use those tactics against Democrats so they see it happen to them. So long as Republicans (and conservatives) take the “high road” the Democrats are simply going to keep using the same tactics because they ACHIEVE THE DEMOCRATS’ GOALS WITH NO CONSEQUENCES TO DEMOCRATS THEMSELVES.
As for me, as I keep saying, I gave up Marquis de Queensbury rules, I’ve picked up my own stick, and anyone who doesn’t like it can go suck eggs. I didn’t set the rules, but I’m gonna play by them. It’s the only way possible to save this country, if it is still savable, which I strongly doubt. We may very well go down, but I’m going down swinging, and I’m swinging at the villains I think are dragging us down.
CC,
Well, yes, it’s idiotic; but you have to admit it’s logical. “Why do they hate us? For the same reasons I hate us, obviously.”
Dean wants a debate, but we can’t debate anything if we all agree.
So, clearly, the thing to do is to abandon Afghanistan (Change) and ignore the probably consequences (Hope). After all, Bush got us into Afghanistan, so why should Obama have to deal with it? It’s Bush’s mess, why should Obama have to clean it up? Shouldn’t it be enough to just kill taliban members with UAV-fired missiles on the sly (the media won’t report it) so we intimidate the taliban, while not committing actual troops to nation building because, after all, we should switch to solar and shut down the coal plants so we don’t have to go to Afghanistan to steal their oil?
OK, I slipped there, let me try again. The UAV thing while not committing troops to nation building because we have no right to that sort of cultural imperialism, and it just makes us enemies anyway while giving Al Qaeda propaganda fodder.
ctl:
Well, you’ve definitely done a credible job of channeling liberal “logic”, I’ll give you that.
You also have to throw in that all the “right” people in Europe and the elitist world of academia will sing Obama’s praises even higher if he abandon’s Afghanistan, and since Obama seems to revel in that sort of adulation, it has to be a powerful temptation for him to seek it out.
If I try to look at this intellectually instead of thinking about, as you put it, actual consequences, then I can actually appreciate this as a window into Obama’s deepest desires and principles.
What I want people to do is to realize what it means when Obama makes his decision. And that includes me. If Obama actually decides to pursue Afghanistan with vigor and stick to a policy that I believe has contributed to the lack of further attacks on the US mainland in the last eight years, then I will be forced to give him credit won’t I?
And you know what, I’d prefer eating crow if it meant that our nation’s security was shown to be a major priority for our President.
I hope it turns out that way. Signs are not positive though.
Thinking about what to do regarding Afghanistan was giving me headaches. Then I read a bunch of books on the relationships between commanders in chiefs and their generals and admirals (Eliot Cohen’s “Supreme Command” is the best) and my thoughts were clarified:
While no one would compare Obama to Lincoln, Clemenceau, Churchill and Ben-Gurion, all of whom Cohen studied and wrote about in depth, there are similarities:
He is going to weigh all options very carefully. He is encouraging dissent. He is insisting that there be a reality-based strategy. Compare those qualities to the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld troika and I have some confidence that Obama will arrive at a decision that approximates a consensus view of what the U.S. should do.
That said, my own view is rather different: Afghanistan was a vital American interest post-9/11. The yarbling of CC and other commenters notwithstanding, it no longer is a vital interest. South Asia as a whole is a vital interest.
Let’s begin a troop drawdown while keeping special opps troops in theater to target AQ and Taliban leadership. But let’s put the major effort into stabilizing the region, which in turn is probably the only way to stabilize Afghanistan. Long story short, the key to doing that is getting India and Pakistan to sit down at the same table.
I don’t think you appreciate how volatile the current situation is. This is like arguing about a patient’s diabetes while he is on the table with several gunshots. We can’t just ignore the gunshots and work on his blood glucose. If we do a drawdown, then there isn’t going to be a table to sit down at. The Taliban will retreat from Pakistan into Afghanistan, and then begin doing to Pakistan what they have been doing to Afghanistan — cross-border attacks. The difference is that instead of attacking the border of Afghanistan, they will be moving through dozens to hundreds of miles of friendly Pakistani territory and hitting the heart.
The Taliban (and AQ, there really isn’t any difference anymore) are forced to tread relatively lightly in Pakistan right now, because they can’t risk a real crackdown by the Pakistanis. They will have much more freedom if they can also operate in Afghanistan, which they will be able to do if we don’t keep the boots on the ground that we have now at the least. Our special forces are very good at what they do. None of the things they do involve holding ground. Being forced to hold a position is a suicide mission for special forces. (See Blackhawk Down.) What you (and Biden) are proposing is to have a handful of special forces pressed into the duty of holding an entire, sparsely populated country that is one of the most difficult in the world to monitor with modern intel gathering methods (like cameras and electronic intel.)
“He is going to weigh all options very carefully. He is encouraging dissent. He is insisting that there be a reality-based strategy. Compare those qualities to the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld troika and I have some confidence that Obama will arrive at a decision that approximates a consensus view of what the U.S. should do.”
Here we have the typical liberal slander against Bush/Cheney. Bush and Cheney not only encouraged dissent in their discussions, but Bush LISTENED to that dissent and followed the advice of his generals when it was not only different from what Bush WANTED to do, but was diametrically opposed to all the “conventional wisdom” about Iraq in the first place.
That is where “the surge” came from. And this knee-jerk, condescending anti-Bush/Cheney pablum that is spewed out and sucked down by the Left is old, tired and pathetic.
Trying to run a war by “consensus” may be exactly what Obama will do, but it is demonstrably NOT the way to run a war.
And as far as my “yarbling” is concerned Shaun, when you have remotely the track record of accuracy that I have proven to have, then you can trot out your condescending pseudo-intellectualizing. Until then, I stand by my results. Your statement that Afghanistan is no longer a “vital interest” of this nation is more than enough to demonstrate the absurd venal naivetee and ignorance of your position with no further rebuttal from me.
Phelps:
I acknowledge that what you are saying is technically correct, but we are looking through opposite ends of the telescope, so to speak.
Afghanistan is ungovernable. No COIN strategy will work because there’s no government to attach it to as there was with the Surge in Iraq. No amount of troops — and we’re talking 100,000 or 200,000 or whatever — can contain and eliminate the Taliban in a country the size of and with the tribal makeup of Afghanistan.
Who, in fact, are the Taliban? They are amorphous as the horrible firefight the other day that left eight Marines dead shows. One day a Taliban is an insurgent, the next day a sheep herder. They don’t wear big flashing lights on their heads and can melt into the hills or a village with ease.
So the question then becomes: Why do we stay in Afghanistan since it is ungovernable, the Taliban are unstoppable and AQ will continue to bounce back and forth across the AfPak border? Is it worth many billions of dollars and many lost U.S. lives? I cannot justify that commitment because there won’t be a payoff in the foreseeable future — or ever.
CC:
Maybe you stayed in your cave the day the Surge strategy was announced. As the record shows, it was a result of Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld doing exactly as I stated they did. Bush finally had a Come to Jesus moment and became convinced that the war was lost and radical action had to be taken. Guess who first convinced him of that? None other than Eliot Cohen. It was then that Bush reached out to Petraeus and the rest, as they say, was history.
To recap, CC: The Surge was a result not of the troika doing the right thing but precisely because they had consistently done the wrong thing and the situation had become desperate.
There is a government. That is what all the purple fingers were about a few years back. You say that no amount of troops can contain them — but about five years ago we did it. Elimination of the Taliban is not a requirement for a successful COIN operation. Turning the people of Afghanistan against them and showing them that the Taliban can be defeated is enough.
“Bush finally had a Come to Jesus moment and became convinced that the war was lost and radical action had to be taken. Guess who first convinced him of that? None other than Eliot Cohen. It was then that Bush reached out to Petraeus and the rest, as they say, was history.”
Oh, and here I thought when you said:
“He is going to weigh all options very carefully. He is encouraging dissent. He is insisting that there be a reality-based strategy. Compare those qualities to the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld troika…” your words actually had some meaning when you defined Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld as some immovable, un-guidable force, when what you ACTUALLY meant is that Bush listened to dissent, recognized reality and changed his approach.
I see now. (sheesh). You meant “compare Bush to Obama, see how similar they are?” right.
Who, in fact, are the Taliban?
The Taliban, like most of the sunni terrorist militias operating worldwide, are a Saudi funded group that fights to defend their local/tribal interests as well as the interests of the various states who fund their activities.
The Taliban is trained and guided by Pakistan’s intelligence agency, ISI. The Pakistani government encourages the Taliban’s existence because the Taliban helps them keep enemy groups, and nations, like India, in line. The government of Pakistan mostly consists of various mob/terrorist interests, and they are primarily responsible for the unrest in the area.
Before we decide what to do about Afghanistan, we have to decide if we want to stabilize South Asia, or if we want to destroy al Qaeda. Personally, I think both goals are impossible because our foreign policy demands that we refrain from attacking the primary supporters of al Qaeda and the Taliban, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
However, if we want to maintain some sort of ‘peace’ without sacrificing too many lives, we should probably use our current troop presence to set up a network of observation sites, to keep a distant eye on the Taliban and the ISI. Combined with UAVs and large caches of explosives in known Taliban hideouts that could be remotely detonated, we could maintain the sort of peace that Israel maintains in Gaza. Of course, this would require that we have functioning and skilled intelligence agents. Which we don’t have.
In any case, most of the al Qaeda fighters have left Afghanistan for the strategically important (and barely reported) war in Yemen. Unlike Afghanistan, Yemen is an easily-accessible seaport. If we wanted to get rid of a large number of al Qaeda, we could launch a surprise attack on them under the guise of fighting piracy in the area, close off the Yemen-Saudi border and do a basic Grenada-type turkey shoot. It woudn’t solve the al Qaeda/terrorism problem permanently, but it would boost morale.
As a coda to my earlier comments, I’d like to stir one other ingredient into the stew: Only the willfully ignorant would fail to grasp that Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld bled men and material from Afghanistan, a war that had to be fought, for Iraq, a war that did not have to be fought.
But it is my belief that even had the right war been prosecuted and the Iraq war remained an unfulfilled neocon wet dream, the U.S.-led NATO coalition would not have prevailed in Afghanistan and we would be pretty much where we are eight years on.
And only the remarkably obtuse confuses what we know now with hindsight and what we could reasonably know then.
Phelps:
What “we” knew then was that the NATO coalition was well on its way to bringing down the Taliban cadre as it then existed but had barely made a pin prick in the AQ leadership. What “we” also knew then was that Saddam was a threat to his own people but little else, but there was an intensive neocon craving to take him out. That was the situation and required no foresight then nor any special hindsight now. The U.S. will leave Iraq in demonstrably worse shape than when it invaded. The Middle East is demonstrably less stable than when it invaded. And Iraq will devolve into chaos once the last American boot is off the ground, making a very bad situation much worse.
If you think that not living under a fascist tyrant (the real kind, not the Chimpy McBushitler kind) is “demonstrably worse” than otherwise, then we have no common ground on which to build any sort of understanding, moral or intellectual.
So did Mary Madigan (which is why I still miss her on the front page)
Thanks, Dean, but I’ve given up on political writing for some of the reasons you’re describing here. Many partisan political commenters care more about the well-being of their party than they care about the well-being of the country.
Because of the way they’ve been acting lately, I don’t like either party. While I can pretend to care about Republican or Democrats’ issues as a way of getting an idea across, I can’t follow the current trend of hating the other side, and calling them ‘the enemy’.
Our political system can survive if there’s conflict between the reds and the blues, but it can’t survive if both sides really hate and want to destroy each other. And, like it or not, we are the only real military force in the world. We have to pay attention to the needs of the world outside. We can’t indulge in another civil war, and we can’t pretend that we’re 1776 revolutionaries. The fact that these silly ideas are so popular is proof that politics currently offers few solutions.
Phelps:
Yes, there is a sliver of common ground or we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
I’m pretty good at a number of things, but playing God is not one of them. However, I have a very tough time rationalizing the expenditure of 4,300 American lives and a trillion bucks to take out a guy who was a big meanie to his own people but toothless against outside adversaries.
If in your God playing you believe that is justification enough, when do we invade Saudi Arabia?
If by “playing God” you mean protecting basic human rights, then as soon as it is feasible.
shaun:
Thanks for your opinion. I’d like to note that you’ve strayed well outside the boundaries Dean set forth in his post. I’m not going to respond to them because most of your opinion is just that, opinion – it doesn’t seem objective.
To the question of Afghanistan:
You really have two choices: pullout or finish the job with the necessary resources. Half-measures of keeping a few bases in the country won’t do it. The Taliban will retake the government and now you’ll have a handful of bases in a country controlled largely by a very hostile enemy, which is itself surrounded by the likes of Iran, China and the unstable Pakistan. That’s a failed plan from the beginning.
To pull out means to abandon the country to the Taliban and AQ, which is precisely what happened when the Russians eventually left. We’ve been down that road already – FAILED.
That leaves finishing the job. It’s a big job. It will take decades. I would suggest moving more troops from permanent bases in Japan and Germany to Afghanistan. I would impose liberal values on the country in the most effective way. McChrystal and Petraeus know best how to do that. This seems like the only rational choice.
Mary:
Unfortunately, as much as you and others may dislike the current political climate, it is the real world we live in.
I had a long response to this, but decided to delete it to try at least a little bit to not stray entirely from the Afghanistan discussion Dean has threatened to ban people over.
Phelps:
To be followed by the invasions of Eritrea, Myanmar, Somalia, Timor, Azerbaijan, Egypt, Iran . . . oh, and the People’s Republic of China.
If they still refuse to recognize basic human rights and it is feasible, yes.
WTF, are you actually arguing against human rights? If so, it would be very refreshing to see a leftist who admits that totalitarianism is what they are after.
As Keith S. notes, we’ve strayed.
His “rational choice” seems to be just that and I would not be surprised if Obama charts more or less a similar course.
One interesting possiblity here is that Obama has already made up his mind on Afghanistan but is unwilling to publicly announce his policy for fear that doing so may upset the applecart on Health Care, Cap and Trade and other parts of his domestic agenda.
That would mean he is playing a waiting game, gambling that the situation in Afghanistan won’t completely fall apart until he gets his bills through Congress. Then he can do what he wants in Afghanistan.
Interestingly, if that is what he’s doing, it might suggest that his intentions are more interventionist and involve more troops than the reverse. That’s because Obama doesn’t need Republicans to get his agenda passed, he needs the far left. So if he’s holding off on his true intentions, it could well be because those intentions would anger the left more than the right.
I have already said that what Obama does in Afghanistan will be a defining moment for his Presidency. I hope he isn’t over-thinking this and ends up being painted into a corner that provides no real options and no real victory for this country. Now I’m also wondering how long we’re going to have to wait. The longer we wait, the more likely it is that he’s trying to avoid angering his left flank.
Unfortunately, as much as you and others may dislike the current political climate, it is the real world we live in.
American “conservative” and “liberal” pundits have a sub-microscopic influence over the entirety of the real world.
Sunni terrorist states gain power and make money by creating ungovernable Mad-Max states like Afghanistan, the Sudan and Somalia. They then use these ungoverned states to provide terrorist training camps, drug money and slaves.
Our Saudi allies are currently trying to turn Yemen into another ungoverned Mad-Max terrorist haven. I’m not sure why our media (right and left) continues to ignore this, but I’d guess it’s mostly because they’re too busy navel-gazing about local partisan issues.
I am inclined to go with what CC was saying earlier to some extent. I believe he is sitting on his hands precisely because he is probably going to call for another increase over and above the 17k troops already moved there. Since this will infuriate the “hard left” he is biding his time as long as possible. Hopefully, he will listen to his general and move the requested number of men. Since Iraq and the U.S. have made a (tentative/probably) agreement to pull out of Iraq in 2011, and Iran has established itself as a threat, we most likely will need a deterrent in Afghanistan. Otherwise Ahmadinejad’s response to any sort of pressure to put down the nukes will be something like, “You gonna make me? You and what Army?”. Another interesting note is that he is just as interested in a stable Afghanistan as we are. Although, it would be nice to have a stable pro U.S. Afghanistan than a stable pro Iran one.
Apparently, Obama had already – and quietly – authorized another 13,000 troops (something he did not issue a press release for; the Washington Post discovered this via a leak and reported it last night.)
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