By Peter Hannaford on 9.25.09 @ 6:07AM
Skittishness will get our president nowhere.
It was the "good" war -- at least that's what Afghanistan came to
be called in last year's Obama campaign. We had diverted
resources to Iraq, the "bad" war, Barack Obama said, when we
should have been concentrating on getting Osama bin Laden.
Obama's left-wing base, always skittish about being thought of as
unpatriotic, was thus given a comfy rationale for supporting a
war. Once in office, the new president came up with a new
Afghanistan strategy in March. We would add more troops, press
our NATO allies to do the same and try a version of the Iraq
surge to win over the inhabitants of towns and villages freed of
the Taliban. He later replaced the commander there with Gen.
Stanley McChrystal, the special ops chief, who would tell the
administration just what was needed to win.
The president's enthusiasm dimmed in August when polls began
showing that a slight majority of Americans had decided the war
wasn't worth the money. Now, that small majority opposes sending
more troops. Support has held among conservatives, Republicans
and some independents, but has been dropping among Democrats.
Secretary of Defense Gates, who through several administrations
has always cut his suit to fit the cloth, began to waffle about
Afghanistan. In August, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs went to
Afghanistan to try to persuade Gen. McChrystal not to send in a
request for more troops.
Early this week, the McChrystal request for 40,000 troops was
leaked. Confusion reigned and still does. Gates and the White
House said the whole strategy was under review. That leading
military strategist George Will had earlier suggested in a column
that we pull out entirely and win the war with aerial drone
attacks on Taliban strongholds. This appealed to more than a few
in the administration and on the left, for no-risk wars are the
only kind they like.
Then Vice President Biden weighed in with a version of the
cut-run-and-bomb-with-drones approach. He thinks we should target
enemy leaders and financiers via drone, à la
Pakistan. This is easier said than done. This tactic has
succeeded once we began to get the necessary on-the-ground
intelligence from the Pakistan military to pinpoint the targets.
We do not have the same resources in Afghanistan and would have
to build them. This takes time. These facts don't deter Joe Biden
who, you will recall, proposed to bring the Iraq war to a
successful conclusion by dividing that country in three (perhaps
he'd spent a sleepless night reading Caesar's Gallic
Wars).
One nameless senior White House aide opined this week that Gen.
McChrystal's job was to concentrate on the situation in
Afghanistan, but there were larger considerations beyond his ken,
such as Pakistan, oil sources, Iran, North Korea, sun spots and
fallen arches.
The leak of the McChrystal troop request forced the issue. Now,
the Pentagon says it will not sit on the formal request after
all, although it did deny bipartisan Congressional requests to
have Gen. McChrystal testify. This prohibition no doubt came from
the White House, which is unsure of what to do and fears that
McChrystal's testimony, like Gen. Petraeus's about the Iraq
surge, will remove Congressional doubts about sending the troops
required to win the war.
"Pacifying" Afghanistan is a quantitatively tougher job than
cleaning out dense neighborhoods in large cities, which was the
situation in Iraq. Afghanistan consists largely of hundreds of
towns and villages dispersed over a large, rugged terrain. To
train an enlarged Afghan army will take many more U.S. and NATO
troops than are now there. And, going from village to village to
clean out Taliban and al Qaeda will take time and many troops of
both armies.
The alternative is withdrawal. Anyone who thinks this will be
seen in the Middle East and South Asia as anything other than a
victory for al Qaeda and the Taliban has not been paying
attention.
The time has come for Mr. Obama to stop dithering, take down that
bottle of courage pills from the shelf and swallow some of them.
(Mr. Hannaford is a member of the Committee on the
Present Danger.)
topics:
Joe Biden, Afghanistan War, George Will
