It appears that the administration is mainly working with the Washington Post in their effort to prep the country for a scale-down of our effort in Afghanistan. That is not to say that the Post is supportive of a scale-down. If anything, the case is the opposite. But, tonight, the Post has another article by Bob Woodward based on an interview with National Security Adviser Gen. James Jones. They have a front-page article on the source of Taliban funding (something I’ve been wondering about for years) by Craig Whitlock. They have an editorial advising us to go all-in or all-out by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. And they have a piece by Walter Pincus on the Taliban’s successful communications strategy.
Whatever the specific intent of any of these articles, the cumulative effect is to convey a sense of an overwhelmingly daunting and hopeless challenge. And, I believe, that is what Obama wants to convey because his objective now is to gently announce that we are abandoning our nation-building effort in Afghanistan and that we will not be giving General McChrystal another 40,000 troops for a massive counterinsurgency program. This will contradict his campaign rhetoric and even some of his moves from the winter and spring. But talking tough on Afghanistan was always partly a way of compensating for being critical of military efforts in Iraq. He didn’t want to look unwilling to fight against terrorists anywhere in the world. But that doesn’t mean that he bought into the absurd ‘war-on-terrorism’ rhetoric of the Bush administration. With the failed elections in Afghanistan removing any semblance of legitimacy for Karzai’s government, there is no reason to invest more in his success. That’s the exact same mistake we made in Vietnam, and it cost us dearly in every way that counts.
The trick is largely political, but it’s also a matter of policy. We don’t want to invest money and lives in a lost cause, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t need a strategy for Afghanistan. We have NATO partners who have sacrificed greatly there. What do they want to do? What kind of aid and support are they willing to provide going forward? What kind of government is there going to be and how do we relate to it? What does the Pakistani government have to say? I think we need to talk to China, Russia, and India about Afghanistan, too, and see what they’re willing to do to help a central government maintain and expand stability.
What we shouldn’t do is more of the same. It’s becoming clear that Obama has already reached that conclusion. But now he has to sell it. And there are a lot of hawks in this country who are going to try to make him look weak and cowardly for doing something smart.
