| The news last weekend of the death of White Sulfur Springs soldier, Michael Rogers, in Iraq was a grim omen of Barack Obama's decision to send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. Rogers' death reminds us that war has a grim arithmetic. More Americans will die because of Obama's decision. More Afghanis will die because of Obama's decision.
Me? I'm not really sure I know what the right decision is. I really like Fred Kaplan's take on the war, not necessarily because of the suppositions, but because he honestly feels gross ambivalence about what to do:
Columnists are supposed to have firm views and express them with steadfast certainty. Since I write a column called "War Stories," the least a reader might expect from me is a clear opinion on whether the United States should escalate or pull out of the war in Afghanistan.
Recently, a friend told me that he couldn't quite figure out where I stood on the issue. I replied that I couldn't quite figure it out, either.
Personally, I supported going into Afghanistan. The Taliban - unlike Saddam Hussein - was connected to al Qaeda, and was harboring Osama bin Laden. Seemed the right thing to do. But now? It seems like our only goal is to keep the Taliban from returning to power. A fool's errand at which we keep throwing troops and money, hoping that the political and cultural system will somehow magically change while we're there. And while we all squabble over health care reform - you know, on programs that actually help people, that improve health and lives - we're throwing a sh*tload of money at a black hole of a war, without knowing why we're there, or what it is we're actually trying to accomplish.
Seymour Hersh was on Fresh Air recently, talking about the security of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. He had this to say in reaction the news that President Obama had demanded an "exit strategy" from Afghanistan from his national security team:
...this could be a...really important step for the president. Because many are concerned...about the fact that he delegated much of the war-making policy to the generals in the field...There isn't a general in the armed forces asked to do that would say, I can't win...So he put himself into a box, and he was very passive for a long time about it. That's why, if you had asked me four days ago about it, I would have thought he was going to make a political decision to do something, to send some token troops, because he doesn't want to lose more independents, he wants to show he can run the war, he can be a tough guy.
But what Obama's done - if he has done what he seems to have done - is he's telling the military, you know what? I don't think it's going to fly. This is huge, because he's basically saying, I'm not going to play politics with the war, I'm not going to do what other presidents have and continue fighting a war that I don't think we can win, and I'm just stalling for time until I can find a way out.
That's what I would have guessed three or four days ago.
Well, Obama's speech last night didn't exactly signal a break from the kind of politicking with the war that Hersh was hoping for - Rachel Maddow even compared Obama's rhetoric to the "Bush Doctrine", the radical rhetoric that endorsed pre-emptive war - but he did set a kind of amorphous exit timeline, something that hasn't yet been discussed for Afghanistan. Still, it reeks of compromise and politics. Worse, all the support from the same folks who were egregiously wrong about Bush's foreign policy - Fred Barnes at the Weekly Standard, say, and other assorted righties - should give us pause.
The reality is that any justification for us going into Afghanistan in the first place is long gone. We're there to baldly protect our own "national" interests, which obviously have more to do with the exchange of commodities than they do with national security or democracy or anything like that. And while there's a commitment to an exit, I guarantee we'll see this whole debate again when it comes up again in a year-and-a-half, at which time we should expect another "compromise."
But...did Obama promise us anything else during the election? Isn't this exactly what he said he was going to do? |
