Obama's Quagmire?
Rick Perlstein, in Nixonland:
It was not as if American leaders hadn't been warned. It was "the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy," the World War II hero Omar Bradley had first observed in 1951. Such sage warnings tended to be ignored. When Undersecretary of State George Ball began criticizing the commitment to South Vietnam in the early 1960's, he was shut out of meetings. He managed to buttonhole the president nonetheless. "Within five years," he said, "we'll have three hundred thousand men in the paddies and jungles and never will find them again. That was the French experience." JFK came back, "George, you're just crazier than hell." Ball indeed misjudged: the actual number of troops at the end of 1966 was 385,300.
The parallels between Vietnam in the early 60's and Afghanistan today are striking. We have a young, idealistic president just taking office, in the face of some doubts over his toughness in matters military. We are propping up a puppet regime that is unpopular with the native population. We are facing an insurgency which has the freedom to cross the border of a neighboring nation for safe harbor. The terrain is ideally suited for our enemy's strengths while neutralizing our technological advantages. And another imperial power has only recently tasted defeat at the hands of the same insurgents.
The American people are, at best, ambivalent towards our presence there. Most of the attention in this country has been focused on Iraq, until just recently. President-elect Obama ran on a pledge to draw down troops in Iraq while escalating the force count in Afghanistan. We've just spent the past five years paying the price in blood and treasure for having a war jammed down our throats through the use of fear-mongering, exaggeration and outright lies.
We, as a nation, deserve a fair and open debate on the proper course for the Afghan conflict going forward. Obama has won the election. He did so partly because the American people preferred his judgement and temperament to John McCain's. It always struck me as discordant when he spoke hawkishly about Afghanistan and Pakistan, coming down somewhere to the right of McCain. Perhaps it was campaign rhetoric designed to offset the stereotype of Democrats being soft on defense. I hope so.
Obama has promised he will listen to his generals when they advise him on a final Iraq withdrawal timetable. If sixteen months works, fine. If it takes longer to get out in a responsible fashion, so be it. One of the main reasons he was elected was because the voters trusted him to bring the Iraq War to an end, rationally and decisively. The same standard must be applied to the war in Afghanistan. If a roadmap for victory can be designed (however victory is defined -- another point of debate) and it necessitates more troops, then, by all means, send more troops. If it's realistic that bin Laden can be captured or killed by our troops venturing into the mountains of northwest Pakistan, let's get it done. But let's also consider that the finest military in the world, along with our intelligence communities, have dedicated the past seven years to the task with no success. They're no closer to cornering him now than they were in 2001 the day after they lost him in Tora Bora, despite the standing offer of a $25 million dollar reward for information leading to his capture or death.
I'm not saying that bringing down bin Laden wouldn't be a huge victory, symbolic as well as tactical. I'm just asking, at what cost? How many more lives is his worth? All we should ask of Obama is that he approaches Afghanistan with the same pragmatism he seems to be applying to Iraq. In other words, he should be as careful going into Afghanistan as he is promising to be careful getting out of Iraq.
If Obama wants to use the Kennedy and Johnson administrations as his models for changing America in big ways, he would do well to remember how Johnson's presidency -- he of the Great Society -- was ultimately undermined by Vietnam.
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The British failed in the early 20th century in Iraq. The French failed before us in Vietnam. And the Russians failed in Afghanistan before us.
You're onto something here. Excellent post. But it needs to be broadened - because Vietnam is just one of the examples we failed to consider.
November 18, 2008 11:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
"I'm not saying that bringing down bin Laden wouldn't be a huge victory, symbolic as well as tactical." I am saying that it won't be a huge victory. Until we stop stirring the pot in the middle east to make circumstances turn out to our advantage, none of the underlying causes of what Bin Laden did will go away; therefore he will be a martyr to many, not a bad example.
November 18, 2008 11:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
I say let the guy get inagurated first and see how the actual tactics take shape. The strategy will clearly be one of multi-national engagement to address common security threats. We very nearly completed in Afghanistan what Russia failed to do, before we diverted to Iraq.
There is certainly a way for Obama to lead us out of Iraq, garner support for stabilizing Afghanistan and foster international cooperation for getting both done as being the only strategy that makes sense for everyone concerned. Which is everyone on the planet. Without stability in the middle east, we will never transition from our petroleum-based economy quick enough to keep the planet from killing us.
I think this post spends a little too much time on allusions not based in accurate comparisons of two totally different presidents in two totally different times. Obama has no need to prove himself up to some martial ideal. He has already laid out some very common sense ideas for changing our foreign policy.
It will take a little more foreign intervention to get it done given how deeply we have injured the entire region for decades.
November 19, 2008 11:11 AM | Reply | Permalink