Trying to Thread the Needle, Obama Falls between Two Stools.
After dithering for nearly 100 days, longer than was required for the initial successful invasion of Afghanistan, Obama typically exploited a photo opportunity at West Point to stage-manage the disclosure of his decision to support his hand-picked general's request for troops, but only to the extent of 75%. In doing so, Obama has antagonized the base of his party who are already upset that he is not fulfilled his pledges to openly integrate the Army with homosexuals, close Gitmo, and pull the troops out of Iraq. Rather than ending the war in Afghanistan, he has now in their view doubled down on the number of troops and extended the war for at least 18 more months.
While dismaying the base of his own party, Obama has given the right, who will not vote for him under any circumstances anyway, half a loaf and has done so grudgingly. He has disappointed the right in three very significant particulars: he has failed to provide all the troops needed; he has imposed an arbitrary time limit; he has failed intelligibly to articulate a definition of victory or a strategy to gain it.
He Has Failed to Provide All the Troops Needed.
A cursory view of the map shows that huge swathes of Afghanistan are currently under the control of the Taliban or are substantially dominated by the Taliban. Even more of Afghanistan is owned by the Taliban at night. From the Northeast to the South of the country, that is along its vast and rugged Himalayan mountain border with Pakistan, the Taliban dominates by virtue of one tribal manifestation or another . All of these territories provide sanctuary to Al Qaeda. The Pashtuns around Kandahar in the south of the country are militantly opposed to the Karzai regime in Kabul.
In examining these geographical and political realities, it is worth noting in passing that the post-speech coverage and analysis on CNN far exceeded in quality the coverage on Fox. Michael Weir in particular provided a sobering analysis of the daunting odds imposed upon us by this geography. He is convinced that many times the number of soldiers being committed by Obama will be required to prevail. Not the least of the problems in Afghanistan are the sanctuaries in Pakistan and the not so clandestine support of many strata of Pakistan Society for the insurgency. The mountain fastness which makes up the Pakistan border provides innumerable avenues for Taliban and Al Qaeda to infiltrate and exfiltrate into and out of Afghanistan. The geography presents an ideal arena to mount a guerrilla.
In fairness to Obama, it should be duly noted that Obama's general, Gen. McChrystal, has said that these 30,000 will be a sufficient troop force. But in fairness to history, it is also important to note that Gen. McChrystal originally wanted many more troops. I just simply find this limited surge not to be formidable enough in view of the geography, the tribalism, the corruption, the antipathy to America and all foreigners, the history of eight years of failure, and the success of Pakistan-based guerrillas exploiting the border.
I fear that it is the enemy who can control troop levels by raising or lowering the pace of its incursions across the border from Pakistan. That gives the enemy the option of flooding the zone. While it is certainly possible for Obama to increase his troop commitment, logistic, economic and especially political, considerations constrain that option considerably. In this respect, one is compelled to make an analogy to Vietnam where the North Vietnamese were ultimately able to manage the flow down the Ho Chi Minh Trail at a sufficient rate to demoralize the American home front.
He Has Imposed An Arbitrary Time Limit.
This is a blunder which is obvious even to an armchair strategist like me. It demoralizes our troops, it encourages our enemies, it discloses our intentions to the enemy, it empowers him, it gives the enemy the option of waiting us out. It demoralizes the Karzai regime and it discourages potential allies among the tribes from attaching themselves to a force which they know will not be there in 18 months and, upon departure, will abandon them utterly to the brutal retaliations of the Taliban. Does anyone really doubt that every apparatchik, police chief and Army colonel in the Karzai government is now actively negotiating to cut any deal he can to survive in post-America Afghanistan?
The buildup will not even commence until many of the 18 months have run. The image is almost comic were it not so dangerous; we can easily foresee American troops entering Afghanistan to serve their tour bumping into troops leaving because the force is being withdrawn. We will have a surge but in which direction? It smacks of opera bouffe.
The time limit has been justified by Obama supporters as a wake-up call to Karzai to clean the corruption out of his regime. That rationalization is not persuasive. To announce a time limit is such an obvious blunder that one can only conclude that Obama made this statement to appease the base of the Democratic Party and as it is shameful political act for the commander-in-chief to expose his troops to added risk to protect his personal popularity. In this Dick Cheney is indisputably correct.
He Has Failed To Articulate an Intelligible Definition of Victory or a Strategy to Gain It.
Obama has articulated a definition of victory but it is not intelligible. No one hearing his words can be sure that we are not in fact embarking on nation building. If we are, it is clear that he is not providing the assets necessary to attain that war aim. He has certainly not allocated sufficient time to attain it. One minute he sounds as though he wants to nation build and the next he emphatically denies it. The problem is conceptual, he has failed to call for victory. This administration persists in the delusion that it can change reality by changing the language. So it enjoins the use of the word "terrorism" and resorts to Orwellian euphemisms, "adverse human events." Now in Afghanistan the administration will not call for " victory" but it wants to get the "job done." Obama's leftism is showing. He is the commander-in-chief whose job it is to order men and women into harm's way where they will be maimed and killed. As he himself rather blithely acknowledges, elementary morality demands that the commander-in-chief articulate a compelling need for that order. He has not.
Most importantly, Obama has failed to articulate a strategy for victory. What do we do about the incursions from Pakistan? There is no articulated solution. So long as we are waging war on the wrong side of an open border, we cannot as a democracy sustain the casualties necessary to staunch the flow by fighting battles of attrition. As noted above, the enemy can and will flood the zone and the enemy will cheerfully trade casualties with us even at a disadvantageous kill ratio. It worked in Vietnam where we killed the Vietcong at a rate of 10 to 1, and it very nearly succeeded in Iraq. Obama has put our forces in place where they are vulnerable to virtually unlimited cross-border incursions but they are saddled with absurd and potentially lethal rules of engagement. Obama has put our troops in harm's way and then rendered them naked in the presence of their enemies.
If the strategy is to build up Afghan military and police forces to provide that nation its own protection, is it realistic to believe that we will accomplish in 18 months what we failed to accomplish in eight years?
Narcissism On Parade
When the speech is stripped away of its filigrees it is essentially more of the same, altered only by a surge which is not a surge because it is limited in time. The essential problems of infiltration and Afghanistan are indeed addressed in stentorian tones hot off the Teleprompter but they are not solved. The president made several assertions which he did not prove and are very likely not true. He asserted essentially that it is necessary to fight a ground war in Afghanistan to prevent Al Qaeda from planning and preparing for another strike on the home because that is where the strike on 9/11 was planned and prepared. This is a dubious proposition. It is inconceivable that Al Qaeda cannot scrape up the godforsaken corners of the Muslim world a few more fanatics to strike our homeland as they did on 9/11. Al Qaeda can do that just as well from Egypt or Sudan, Pakistan or even Iraq as they could from Afganistan. American boots ground serving as an Army of occupation simply does not ensure that Al Qaeda cannot mount terrorist attacks.
The expressed war aim- to prevent Al Qaeda from mounting more attacks on our homeland-does not really enhance our national security if Al Qaeda can just as easily plan and launch such attacks from other venues. Thus the entire justification for the surge and for the whole war is rendered feckless.
One cannot leave the speech without noting a particular irony. Obama was at pains to claim credit for himself for changing the perception in the Muslim world of America by virtue of his incessant apologies and mia culpas for America's alleged misdeeds. The accelerating number of casualties in Afghanistan belie that claim. Does Obama believe we would be sustaining fewer casualties if he had actually closed Guantánamo Bay? To believe that one must have an utterly naïve understanding of the tribal mentality which has motivated the likes of the Taliban since Alexander The Great and the fanaticism which has motivated aggressive Islam since Mohammed went to the mountain. The irony is that the need for the surge is evidence of the utter failure of Obama's groveling diplomatic overtures.
The speech is incoherent because the policy is a craven attempt to appease two mutually exclusive constituencies. He tried to appease his left wing base while trying avoid appearing before the world as the author of failure in Afghanistan. He failed to thread that needle. Alas, Obama will not pay the price alone. The wages of narcissism in a Commander in Chief are too often casualties on the field.
