Obama & Afghanistan

Last night, the president outlined a plan to send 30,000 additional military troops to Afghanistan. As you can imagine, reaction is varied. Many Democrats may actually be against the decision, while many Republicans may support it. However, in this day of Republican cat-callers never being able to say anything good about Obama, the Conservative press is not in line with some of the Republican political establishment and the establishment itself cannot 100% support the president on anything for fear of their base. As David Kurtz of TPM notes:

The Republican talking point this evening in reaction to the speech is that if Obama is really, truly, unconditionally committed (no fingers crossed behind his back) to the Afghanistan effort, he wouldn't set an "artificial" deadline for withdrawing troops.

This was, of course, a Republican mantra throughout Bush's second term in resisting Democratic efforts to end the Iraq War. But what they don't seem to remember is that even Bush himself came around by mid-2008 to setting a timeline for withdrawal.

Glenn Beck, as rancid a human being as ever existed in the US, presented his resounding raspberry to the president. Stephen Colbert pokes that balloon here very nicely. God bless Colbert.

A large body of responses can be found on The Huffington Post.

What do I think? I honestly don't know, which is quite different from where I was in the time leading up to the war in Iraq. That war I was against from the get-go. Here the situation is different, in large part because we have a backdrop of eight years of fighting already under our belt. Should we have been focused on Afghanistan entirely since the days after 9-11? Of course, but if wishes were horses, even pigs would fly. The problem with any line of attack in the region is very much like our issues in Iraq. Namely, to have any hope of winning a military victory, we must achieve a political and moral victory as well. Our goals and our methods must be fully embraced by the Afghan people. We must work with an Afghan government that is fully embraced by its people and seen as its guardian, not as a pawn or as the mafia. And because the problems in Afghanistan are intimately tied with Pakistan, these similar objectives must be achieved simultaneously with both the people and the government of that nation as well.

Finally, all this must be achieved against a backdrop of domestic political and moral ambiguity. I see no way for Americans to unite around this war effort. Even if another foreign attack were to hit us now domestically, we would not see the come-together spirit that President Bush squandered after 9-11. Rather, it would further serve to splinter America's political "leadership" and its people. Thus, the political objectives that must be achieved for victory are built upon a foundation of shifting sand, a foundation that exists in America, in Pakistan, and in Afghanistan.

Is Obama's choice of military option correct? Maybe. Can it work? Only if 1,000 stars line up just right. And the real problem is that any other choice needs those same 1,000 stars to line up to work, too.

I hope that the president is correct. Moreover, I hope that he is right. And God help us all.

2 December 2009

Addition: I'm going to add a link to an op-ed by Thomas Friedman since it is not linked via The Huffington Post above.

Addition: Thoughts of former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. His thoughts on Americans preaching about corruption are interesting.