President Barack Obama announced this week, in his latest glamour speech—this one choreographed among cadets at West Point—the substance of the new U.S. “Afghan strategy.”
I last wrote about this on Oct. 28, when we’d been waiting seven months for particulars to accompany the glamour-speech “comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan,” that was delivered last March. I suggested that Obama had shown himself to be a president unable to make hard decisions. He makes speeches instead—vacuous speeches that sound very grand to a poorly-informed mass audience, but on reading we find only posturing narcissism. This is a serious flaw in the “leader of the free world.”
But even presidents who can’t make decisions get cornered by “events,” and eight months after his initial rhetorical offering, with much additional posturing, Obama finally gave the U.S. and allies a policy of sorts. It was designed to provide “something for everybody.” For those who believed his campaign promise to be “strong on security,” 30,000 new troops were to be sent into action. For those who didn’t, he added the promise that they would all be withdrawn shortly after arrival.
Within 24 hours, this new policy was dutifully acknowledged and saluted by all the NATO heads of government, in the time-honoured manner: rhetorical support to compensate for inadequate contributions to the mission.
What they say, and what they think, are of course two different things. For I can’t believe Stephen Harper, or any of the other current NATO heads of government, is capable of believing a mission with no end in sight after eight years can be crisply wrapped up in Obama’s arbitrary time frame of 12 to 18 months (when he has just wasted eight). And this is not only a moral question—playing with human lives in a dream world—but also a matter of sound politics. The public must be prepared for bad news in the future, or the politician who misled them will reap the consequences.
Obama would seem to have spent those last eight months in the Afghan file cherry-picking this worst possible combination of policies: “Escalate, then cut and run.”
Or we could use a hockey analogy. Suddenly it’s the last minute of play, and you’re down one goal. So you pull your goalie, and put in an extra defenceman.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal gets three-quarters of the troops he requested, but no clear approval of the missions he wanted them for, which included more aggressive and continuous attacks on Taliban sanctuaries.
Instead, the new troops are to “protect population centres.” That is certainly one of the functions of troops: to make the civilian Afghan population feel safe enough from Taliban attacks that they will not feel the need to make accommodations with the enemy. But that intention is undercut when they know those troops will soon be gone. (And the Taliban need only await the final buzzer.)
Indeed, the very delivery of these extra troops “a day late and a dollar short” was accompanied by dark insinuations in Obama’s speech that the Bush administration before him had failed to provide the resources their generals had requested. Former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, quiet in his retirement, rightly spoke up on this, knowing it to be a lie, and demanded an inquiry.
It is extremely bad form on the part of the current U.S. president, to continue slandering the previous administration, as a source of cheap excuses. This shows a terrible inability to assume responsibility; and is the more reprehensible in light of Bush’s refusal to blame the Clinton administration for ghastly oversights that contributed to 9/11. It was not in the American interest to backbite; and a president is obliged to remember that national interest.
But back to the future. Whoever is to be blamed for failure to eliminate the Taliban, the task of eliminating them remains. The idea that, in a new arbitrary time frame of 12 to 18 months, Afghan forces can be trained to do this, is ridiculous. For as we’ve found in Iraq, it takes considerably longer, not merely to teach people how to use high-tech western equipment, but to inculcate the western values, including habits of organization and discipline, that can make them an effective fighting force. There is no wand for some Circe to wave.
Having telegraphed the escalation last March, Obama will certainly find an enemy that is ready for it. The Taliban have been experimenting with new locales for insurgency in the north of Afghanistan, for the express purpose of draining and diffusing allied anti-insurgency efforts. They will be very grateful for Obama’s precise exit schedule; for while they were expecting U.S. stamina to run out within a couple of years, they now have a time-tabled commitment to surrender.
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