Posted on 09/04/2009 5:00:42 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
If he wants to prevail in Afghanistan, Barack Obama needs a George W. Bush moment. He’ll have to ignore the polls, brush aside doubters in his own party, and reinforce a failing war effort.
Bush did all that, and more, when he ordered the surge in Iraq in January 2007. He also had to buck his own military brass and almost the entirety of a foreign-policy establishment that considered the feckless recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton commission holy writ. He operated from a position of political weakness so debilitating, Lyndon Johnson might have identified with it in his final days.
Compared with those headwinds, Obama is experiencing a late-summer breeze on Afghanistan. He’s a new president in whom the American public hasn’t yet lost faith, even if he’s faded from his post-election heights. In a CBS poll, four in ten say they want troop levels decreased, and only 48 percent approve of Obama’s handling of Afghanistan. That’s nothing like the collective “enough” the public had exclaimed about the Iraq War prior to the surge.
But Obama will need three especially Bushian qualities if he is to spare his country a humiliating retreat or an underresourced, inconclusive slog in Afghanistan: sincerity, perseverance, and courage.
Bush risked his presidency on Iraq because of his heartfelt belief in its strategic importance. Obama sounds just as categorical about Afghanistan. If he believes it, he’ll make the tough calls. If not, he’ll be prone to Rumsfeldian half-measures that will ensure all our sacrifices are made on behalf of failure.
We’d be in even worse shape if Obama hadn’t already sent 21,000 additional troops earlier this year. The buzz among coalition commanders on the ground was that August would be a trying month — casualties would spike, and Americans back home would sour. So it has come to pass. If Obama approves another request for additional forces from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, it will mean even more casualties as — for some period of time — the Taliban look as strong as ever.
Bush had to endure a similarly treacherous lag between our troops’ fighting their way to outposts among the population in Iraq and the results in enhanced security. Obama, too, will have to persevere, and have the fortitude to disregard the voices of his own politicos who want nothing to do with an Afghan escalation, to ignore his most fervent supporters who fear he’ll wreck his presidency in the Hindu Kush, and to stomach poll numbers that will get worse.
If the war can’t be fought on the cheap, it can’t be sold on the cheap, either. Obama gives the impression of wanting to maintain at least 68,000 troops in a far-off conflict in Central Asia in which dozens of Americans die every month, without ever mentioning it except when scheduled for the occasional speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
He’ll have to convince the public that the war is necessary and winnable when the charm of simply characterizing it as the “good war” in contrast to Iraq has worn off.
If we withdrew, the Taliban would take over swaths of the country and would likely host al-Qaeda again. Pakistan would feel pressure to return to embracing the Taliban fully as its proxy in a war that would become a free-for-all for Afghanistan’s neighbors. This would strengthen the hand of extremists within Pakistan at the same time our credibility would have sustained a devastating blow.
The war is far from lost. Kabul is relatively safe, certainly compared with the hellish extremity of Baghdad in 2006. The areas that are in the worst shape, in the south, are those in which we have had the fewest forces. The population doesn’t want a reprise of Taliban rule. If we could recover in an Iraq that had descended to Dante’s seventh circle, Afghanistan is salvageable with enough resources and time.
As he contemplates his next move, Obama should ask an unexpected question: “What would Bush do?”
— Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review.
lets skip to a conservative.
WWRWRD?
(What Would Ronald Wilson Reagan Do?)
I would like to hear what the Libs say about this. LOL.
I never believed for one second that Obama thought Afghanistan had to be a successful undertaking. There was a point in the campaign where he had been nothing but negative about Iraq (a mistake from the start, he said), but the surge was working and things were improving. At that point, his anti-war stance was hurting him, so he changed to Iraq was a mistake, but Afghanistan was a really important conflict that had to be won.
He didn’t mean a word of it, but had to do something to avoid being viewed as another Dim who undercut foreign policy and the military, and contributed to failed policies. Now he’s sort of stuck with his campaign rhetoric even as things in Afghanistan become more complicated.
EXACTLY!
But in all fairness to George W. Bush, let’s just all thank God that in his last couple of months he took out the Iranian nuclear program AND those pesky little North Korean bastards with precisely targeted air strikes, let the leftists and weak sisters wail and bitch about it, but left the world a safer place after he turned over the government to 0bama-lama-ding-dong on 20 January of this year.
‘Ooops’
..why do people think the Joker makes decisions?. Czars and people we still know nothing about, are making policy. As each major decision he's made so far...has had to be renamed,reshaped,recalculated,and reintroduced..it is clear to most, he hasn't a clue.
Well, See, Here is the thing; 0bama may want to prevail in Afghanistan..... But he doesn't want the USA to prevail..... There, or anywhere.
“Prevail” and “Afghanistan”. Words that have never gone together, ever, in recorded history.
Oh please, gimmee a break!! It’s a freakin’ WAR. You win by killing a bunch of the other guys, destroying their roads and bridges and totally demoralizing them and the other supporters of their side.
We need to ramp up action and also start quietly “persuading” any countries supplying the cave dwellers with weapons that it is not a good idea and may result in a markedly shorter life span.
Stephanopolis pays tribute to those soldiers who gave their life during each week. It’s very noticeable that he lumps Afghanistan deaths with Iraq...I really think they should be separated.
Like leaving Lebanon after the 1983 terrorist attack on the Marines barracks that is considered the beginning of the militant islamic terrorism on the US. That withdrawal from Lebanon taught the terrorists that if you hit the Americans they will flee, all that until President Bush showed these evil subhumans that it will not be the case anymore, at least not while he was President.
President Bush would do what he has always done, he would win. The Taliban and Al Qaeda have been emboldened by The Little Dictators election. This is not the only place on our planet that is going to rise up against us...
For you ignorant Bush bashers here...grow up.
The point is there are no roads or bridges. It is Afghanistan!!
You are projecting conventional mentality of a situation that doesn’t exist. The ejection of Al Qaeda is complete. The enemy now is the Taliban. The Taliban is part and parcel of the population.
To defeat them there must be complete and total rejection of the Islamic fanaticism. There must be agreement among the various chiefs who assisted in the destruction of AQ to start over minus the Taliban.
Vaquero,
“What would Bush do?” would not have been my choice of words.
The only reason Bush did what he did in Jan of 07 is because he was killed in the 2006 elections as a result of taking a ‘nap’ and completely mismanaging the Iraq war for 3-1/2 years (remember IEDs, decapitations, insurgency, etc..). The dude finally ‘woke up’ (briefly), and realized that he needed more manpower in the field.
Sadly, he went back to taking a ‘nap’ on the domestic side, and set us up for the ‘bailout mania’ which opened the door (WIDE OPEN WITH open-handed-gatekeepers) to NOBAMA and the radical communists now infesting our government.
Pluhhhheasssse! Don’t tell me we need a “Bush moment”!
Bush was ok...
small o....small k.
I would have voted for him again against McCain in the primaries. But he never, ever would have been my first choice....
Yeah, your correct. But still, if we can unceasingly keep killing them they will quit. It takes much less time to destroy a terrorist then to create one old enough to do damage. And even though it plants the seed for future terrorists it nonetheless gives us time to change the thinking.
......if we can unceasingly keep killing them they will quit.....
I don’t disagree with that. The problem is finding them. In my mind the summer campaign, they seem to only go to war for three or four months out of the year, and then they come back and blend into the population.
To be killed they must be pointed out. The similarity to the Viet Cong seems striking. They are the people and they harm the people.
Last night I attended a Town Hall meeting and there was a loud pacifist hack denouncing the war in Iraq. These idiots care fo nothing except proving they are superior in their view that all war, any war, is unjustified. They are the American equivalent of the fanatic Taliban. We don’t kill them, we allow the cancer to continue to destroy our body.
The question remains, what will Obama do? The vast majority of Americans want victory. It's a no brainer for him as a CINC. But Obama is no CINC and our forces in Afghanistan are on a very long hook under increased ROE limits imposed by the administration.
I have to agree with every word of this article. I hope that he does the right thing for America - at least one time here.
Good fantasy, but unfortunately no attack that Pres.Bush could make was a reasonably successful “surgical strike”, in and out proposition. If it was, I believe he would have done that. A failed strike would have left this neophyte with a situation that he was even less capable of handling.
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