December 2, 2009--Hello, We Must Be Going

Early in the 1930 Marx Brothers move Animal Crackers, Groucho, playing Captain Geoffrey T. Spaulding, the famed African explorer is feted by society matron Mrs. Rittenhouse. Mayhem of course follows. Groucho has nothing but his usual zany contempt for the world of these stuffed shirts and in response to being welcomed by her and them dances and sings his way through one of my favorite songs, “Hello, I Must be Going.”

Last night while listening to President Obama’s speech about Afghanistan, I couldn’t restrain myself from thinking he was saying pretty much the same thing—

He announced that he will send 30,000 more American soldiers there, but almost in the same breath said that they will begin to withdraw only a few months after they arrive. In effect, “We’re here but we must be going.”

What we have been unable to accomplish in eight years, General McChrystal will be asked to do in fewer than 18 more months. To quote Obama from last week—to “finish the job.” Whatever that is.

Sadly, this sounded more like the too-willing-to-strike-a-deal-by-compromising Obama than a commander in chief who has the chops to say either I am making a 10-year commitment to the region and will send in hundreds of thousands of additional troops if necessary; or, my preference, I am bringing the current forces home because we should not have been there in the first place since the primary threat to our security then and now is what happens in Pakistan. That is where Al Qaeda is, that is where the nuclear weapons are, and that is where—if the government falls to radical Islamists--we will face real and not imagined perils.

I knew the rationale for this escalation was shaky when Obama so often felt the need to invoke 9/11. By my count, at least half a dozen times. So often that I thought he was channeling Rudy Giuliani.

And I knew that even Obama knew he was on thin historical ice when he tried to deny the obvious parallels between our involvements in both Vietnam and Afghanistan; when he made it seem as if all Taliban are the same and have similar goals when he and we know that this is patently untrue—some are super nationalists, not jihadists, and “only” strive to topple the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan and want both us and al Qaeda out of their countries; and worst of all Obama ignored the basic lesson from our recent experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan—how nearly impossible it is to train and then mobilize a national army and security force so that they can protect their own people and governments, no matter how corrupt and propped up those regimes are by our threats and bribes.

Right there in Afghanistan, where his delineation of a not-so-new mission calls for this very training mission as the centerpiece of his strategy, we have for at least six or seven years failed to accomplish this goal.

As I have noted before and has been widely reported (see, for example the linked New York Times article), the Afghans we recruit desert almost as fast as we can train them. So what about that irrefutable fact, something we have confronted for many years, is going to change by adding “only” 30,000 more troops and giving our commanders “just” 18 more months?

So, friends asked last night, what should he do? Not an easy question. It is so much easier to criticize without knowing all the intelligence, but I would focus exclusively where the dangers are real—yes, on North Korea and Iran, but primarily on Pakistan.

Obama is right to call for a new kind of partnership with them. That’s what I would have recommended: to say we are getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan as quickly as possible, leaving behind the right kinds of residual forces, and with the resources we thus liberate (including money—real or borrowed) we will concentrate on ways to build a new and more effective partnership with Pakistan. Not invade and occupy them as we did and are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, but to try to build a deeply interdependent strategic relationship that would concentrate, if we want to do any of this, on a massive nation-building effort in Pakistan.

And I would further say to my president, for whom I still harbor great hopes—how could any American not—you have been making a fundamental political and historical mistake:

You have opted to go along with the generals and the hawks because you believe that makes you look forceful and strong—a real leader and not another liberal wimp. But the lessons of recent history show that this often results in failure and ultimately weakness.

You obviously feel that bringing real change to the way we deploy ourselves in the world (emphasizing “soft power” and not primarily military force) would make you look weak. Again, while many lessons from history suggest that in certain circumstances doing what appears to be weak turns out to be effective and the leaders who had the courage to follow that course (and it takes more courage to risk appearing weak than sending in the military) turn out retrospectively to have been among our strongest. Let’s remember that the Marshall Plan to rebuild the economies of our Nazi enemies was criticized by many at the time as weakness, but that soft approach won the peace and helped ultimately to win the Cold War.

And finally I suspect that you are aware of all of these lessons and the contradictions in your own new policy.

Is it by chance that your saying hello-we-must-be-going has us beginning that going in 2011, right in the middle of your own reelection campaign? Or was this target date arrived at after months of careful strategic thinking and planning?

Of such carven things no profiles in courage are written; and history, the history of which you are well aware, is waiting to pass its own judgment. In the meantime, more of our young will be killed and maimed.

That darting, unfocused look on your face last night served as a running commentary on the equivocations and compromises embedded in your thoughts and words and suggested you know better. More’s the pity.