June 24, 2010--Afghanistan Redux
Barack Obama had no choice but to accept General McChrystal's resignation, though I would have preferred if he had fired him for insubordination. The constitutional issue--civilian control of the military--trumps personality conflicts, political positioning, or the media feeding frenzy that is unleashed when they sniff out as juicy a story as this.
But the McChrystal to-do is a distraction from the real story: why are we any longer fighting a full-scale war in Afghanistan and where are our efforts heading?
George W. Bush also had no choice but to have us become engaged there after 9/11. It was where Al Qaeda trained and made its plans to attack us. But Al Qaeda is no longer operating from Afghanistan--what is left of them is located in Pakistan--and we have somehow become involved in nation-building in the region. Our current war is against the Taliban who only indirectly were involved in the 2001 attack on the United States. Yes, they are reprehensible, having suppressed the people of Afghanistan, especially women, but there is sadly a long list of other countries where leaders are tyrannical and the people subjugated. Thankfully, we have not determined to invade any of them.
And if history tells us anything, Afghanistan is the last place in the world where a country with empire-building aspirations (us in this case) should be picking a fight. They do not have any resources that a superpower requires (opium poppies are their one viable export item) and the terrain on which battles must be fought is about the most forbidding on earth.
Just ask Alexander the Great about what it's like to attempt to conquer what we now call Afghanistan. Just ask the British. Or the Soviets. Empires have begun their falls in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan. And now we are in danger of meeting the same fate. More than 1,000 our our young men and women have already been killed, this month we are on track to setting a record for the number of our troops killed in combat, and of course we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars there that could have been put to better use rebuilding our own nation.
So why did Barack Obama, back in the fall of 2009, decide to triple the number of troops on the ground in Afghanistan? He is a literate man; he knows history; he knows about the Greeks and the Brits and the Soviets. So what was he thinking?
As I attempt to get inside his head I can think of only one explanation--he was politically motivated. Domestically politically motivated.
He was relatively new in office; he had no military experience of his own and thus he had to portray steadfastness; he was an anti-war supposed liberal who had to demonstrate his Commander-In-Chief chops; and he was attempting to put together a bipartisan coalition in Congress so he could get his domestic legislative agenda approved. So he escalated.
He was pandering to his two prized Cabinet appointments--Robert Gates who had been appointed by Bush and who Obama was eager to have stay on as Secretary of Defense and Hillary Clinton, who he envisioned as the captain of his Team of Rivals. Both hawks who Obama, in his accommodating ways, was attempting to appease.
And then he must have thought that if he flexed his newly-found military muscles in Afghanistan he would hear kind works from the likes of John McCain, who in another version of a Team of Rivals, this time with Republican congressional leaders, would work with him in a bipartisan way on health care reform, immigration, and energy policy.
Obama misread the political realities on all fronts. Gates and the generals and Clinton rolled him on foreign policy, getting him to agree to a disastrous expansion of our involvement in Afghanistan, that graveyard of empires; and John McCain, who hates Obama more than he despises Sarah Palin, along with virtually all other Republicans, has been a mean-spirited political opponent on every conceivable issue. Including ones that he previously supported!
Obama is thus left reaping the whirlwind.
So let us not be too distracted by this McChrystal business. It is a sideshow. The real issues involve our strategic overreach and the fact that some of the best of our young people are being sacrificed for craven political purposes. Failed ones at that.
But the McChrystal to-do is a distraction from the real story: why are we any longer fighting a full-scale war in Afghanistan and where are our efforts heading?
George W. Bush also had no choice but to have us become engaged there after 9/11. It was where Al Qaeda trained and made its plans to attack us. But Al Qaeda is no longer operating from Afghanistan--what is left of them is located in Pakistan--and we have somehow become involved in nation-building in the region. Our current war is against the Taliban who only indirectly were involved in the 2001 attack on the United States. Yes, they are reprehensible, having suppressed the people of Afghanistan, especially women, but there is sadly a long list of other countries where leaders are tyrannical and the people subjugated. Thankfully, we have not determined to invade any of them.
And if history tells us anything, Afghanistan is the last place in the world where a country with empire-building aspirations (us in this case) should be picking a fight. They do not have any resources that a superpower requires (opium poppies are their one viable export item) and the terrain on which battles must be fought is about the most forbidding on earth.
Just ask Alexander the Great about what it's like to attempt to conquer what we now call Afghanistan. Just ask the British. Or the Soviets. Empires have begun their falls in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan. And now we are in danger of meeting the same fate. More than 1,000 our our young men and women have already been killed, this month we are on track to setting a record for the number of our troops killed in combat, and of course we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars there that could have been put to better use rebuilding our own nation.
So why did Barack Obama, back in the fall of 2009, decide to triple the number of troops on the ground in Afghanistan? He is a literate man; he knows history; he knows about the Greeks and the Brits and the Soviets. So what was he thinking?
As I attempt to get inside his head I can think of only one explanation--he was politically motivated. Domestically politically motivated.
He was relatively new in office; he had no military experience of his own and thus he had to portray steadfastness; he was an anti-war supposed liberal who had to demonstrate his Commander-In-Chief chops; and he was attempting to put together a bipartisan coalition in Congress so he could get his domestic legislative agenda approved. So he escalated.
He was pandering to his two prized Cabinet appointments--Robert Gates who had been appointed by Bush and who Obama was eager to have stay on as Secretary of Defense and Hillary Clinton, who he envisioned as the captain of his Team of Rivals. Both hawks who Obama, in his accommodating ways, was attempting to appease.
And then he must have thought that if he flexed his newly-found military muscles in Afghanistan he would hear kind works from the likes of John McCain, who in another version of a Team of Rivals, this time with Republican congressional leaders, would work with him in a bipartisan way on health care reform, immigration, and energy policy.
Obama misread the political realities on all fronts. Gates and the generals and Clinton rolled him on foreign policy, getting him to agree to a disastrous expansion of our involvement in Afghanistan, that graveyard of empires; and John McCain, who hates Obama more than he despises Sarah Palin, along with virtually all other Republicans, has been a mean-spirited political opponent on every conceivable issue. Including ones that he previously supported!
Obama is thus left reaping the whirlwind.
So let us not be too distracted by this McChrystal business. It is a sideshow. The real issues involve our strategic overreach and the fact that some of the best of our young people are being sacrificed for craven political purposes. Failed ones at that.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
5:11 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home