I'll admit this up front: I'm not firmly pro-war or anti-war. I think that there is a national security case to be made for this war -- less as it concerns Afghanistan itself than broader security policy. In my view, the case that Obama himself will ultimately view it as a "dumb war" is slightly stronger.
When it comes to this President, though, I'm unambivalently pro-re-election. We know the sorts of people who would replace him, and to not quite coin a phrase: "we can't trust these people with nuclear weapons." I think that, in the long run, a return to Republican rule sacrifices more lives than are at stake in this single conflict.
I will therefore do something that proponents of both sides of the fence may find offensive: I will consider the escalation purely as a political matter and explain why I as an outside observer of these events end up opposing them, without rancor or contempt for my President, and recognizing that he may have reason to disagree with me.
I oppose the escalation of the war in Afghanistan (which I'll henceforth refer to just as "the war"), to quote Hamlet, more in sorrow than in anger. If, as I suspect, Obama made the wrong decision, I still believe that it was a thoughtful and reluctant decision; I am heartened that he was the one making it. The President doesn't deserve excoriation; rather, this is a time to bear in mind (and in speech) that Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld just screwed things up so badly that there was no good option available to be chosen. Contrast that with -- well, almost any decision made by his predecessors.
The military considerations
To be honest, part of the reason I incline against Obama's expanding the war is that every time the drumbeats of war have moved me to my feet I've ended up feeling burned. It always turns out that something material, often decisive, is being left out. So my bias (and I'll admit that it is that) is not to trust the people beating those drums. For one thing, as I noted a couple of weeks ago, when you pay someone to come up with military solutions, you should not be surprised when all they come up with are military solutions. (And that's before profit for contractors and the like enters the equation.) In contrast, the Eikenberry advice, from the Ambassador's office, seems more likely to be unbiased.
I start from the presumption that this war is less about Afghanistan as about Pakistan, and that much is being said in secret that I (and probably you) don't know. Maybe Al Qaeda is more powerful than hoped and that sending troops to Afghanistan will help prevent carnage in Pakistan while the latter country finally takes that threat seriously. (It seems likelier to me, though, to have the opposite effect.) Maybe it's that Al Qaeda is weaker than feared and that cooperation with Pakistan now makes eliminating the Al Qaeda presence on both sides of the Af-Pak border conceivable. (It seems likelier to me, though, to just mean that they have to wait out the escalation, Al Qaeda protected by their marital ties into Pashtun clans, and the Taliban able to blend into the population as much as it wishes. I don't see how one makes peace with Afghanistan's assembly of villages except village by village.)
But see? There at the end I started talking about Afghanistan, and Afghanistan appears to me to be the distraction, here, the Maguffin, the Maltese Falcon or Fargo or Rachel that gets the title role but not the prime substance. It was fractured and corrupt before, it will be fractured and corrupt after; the best that can be hoped is that we make friends with villagers, help those people who want to get into a persistently safe haven in Kabul (and perhaps nowhere else in the country), buy up the opium crop if we're smart, and a few other things. What's driving this policy is probably what's possible in Pakistan now, and what's possible in Pakistan now is beyond what most of us can guess.
My suspicion (and I take no pride of authorship here, as it has pretty much been reported -- although so has its opposite) is this: Obama wants to make a good faith effort the "Give War a Chance." He wants to let the Republican and the military brass have their free hand at getting Afghanistan back on its feet and potentially able to control its population and its borders, and perhaps at giving Pakistan a chance to rid itself of the Al Qaeda remnants on the Af-Pak border -- and if it works, great, and if it doesn't work, he'll order them to leave.
It's that last part that I don't trust. There is precedent for this: the four thrusts that took place at the time of the Surge in Iraq: troop escalation, "success" of ethnic cleansing at establishing a de facto religious border, the "Anbar Awakening," and the de facto "jobs program" of putting natives on payroll to fight for our side, have left Iraq in a position where it can probably more or less govern itself and more or less control its internal security. True, it's largely going to be as an Iranian ally run by corrupt politicians and kidnappers, which was not the initial plan. But developments there have allowed us to leave with as much honor as we can still muster; when insurgents blow up a mosque there, our first reaction need no longer be what we're going to do about it, but what they're going to do about it. The point is, "strategy"-based or not, we can limp towards the exit.
Can we envision a similar "success" with Afghanistan? I doubt it.
Political repercussions
War proponents are largely happy now because they got their candy. They will be unhappy in the future and they will disavow their present satisfaction. Their first argument will be -- no matter what happens -- that Obama didn't give them what they wanted.
To wit: Obama gave them 10,000 less troops than McChrystal sought and he set a date certain to begin withdrawal. (Plus he's weak and a Muslim, some of them will say, but let's set that aside for now.) When things don't work out -- and that's the way to bet -- these "failures" will be identified as the reasons, the "for want of a nail" scenarios, that led to defeat and disgrace. There will be no end of military experts who will testify to this, no matter what a rational and dispassionate analysis of the situation would say, and they will have access to no end of microphones.
You may wonder: why, then, didn't Obama give them everything they wanted? Part of the reason is the presence countervailing political forces (such as us); part of the reason is that no matter what he did, it would not be enough. There will always be some future moment when he could have been more hawkish than logic will dictate, and that will be "proven" to have been the germinated seed of defeat.
Why give in at all, then? Probably, as a political matter, because not everyone is partisan and crazy. Obama is facing an institutional imperative here. Most of the people he gets to talk to -- and let's not blame Rahm entirely for this, because any Chief of Staff would either be the same or be ridden out of town on a rail -- are of the mindset that our comparative advantage over the rest of the world is our military and that we have to show that we are willing to use it when we think it will help. Here, they've come up with the right way to appeal to Obama: "let the military give us some breathing space that we can use to further negotiations." (They're good at finding ways to influence Presidents; for Bush, they were probably saying "your face will be on a coin!")
At any rate, I think it's likely that expanding the war won't succeed politically -- except for Republicans wanting to demoralize Democrats. A large part of that reason is that it won't stop when he wants it to stop. Obama's political opponents don't even have to start the real fight until after the 2010 elections. Then (especially if our opponents do well), the muttering will quickly rise to a crescendo: "If he starts drawing down troops in June 2011 -- while we are so close to victory -- then that will be the sole reason for our defeat."
So, in the long term, he's screwed either way. He just has to decide when he wants to be blamed unfairly for our "loss" there. One of the most important things he can do, between now and then, is to make sure that all of the actors in the area are reading from the same script. Pakistan will be able to pull the rug out from under him, if it decides it would prefer a Republican Administration, by complaining that it's being abandoned at it's time of critical need. I hope he's ensuring that that won't happen.
Our political opponents' goal, of course, is to push him to continue the war even longer -- partially because maybe it will work, partially because people are making money off it, and partially because the longer he's stuck in the war the worse his re-election chances get. (By the way: someone will no doubt note that if he doesn't believe in the war and feels that he has to stay in it anyway, he's being politically weak. These guys leave no ground uncovered.)
Again, I admit: there may be a compelling military reason for this escalation. But politically, it looks to me to be a certain dead end, barring unexpected lasting victory. Better to take the hit now than later. (Of course, what the Republicans really hope for is more terrorism that can be traced to any such withdrawal, so that Democrats can be blamed for it forever. It will become the next "Jimmy Carter caused all of our problems because he didn't sufficiently support the Shah" storyline. That's why, if we withdraw, Obama had better document clearly and /understandably how the situation was unwinnable.)
Where does this leave Democratic activists?
To me, the paradigmatic case of how anti-war activism can blow up in one's face in 1991. I opposed the first Gulf War, partly because I believed that economic sanctions could take Saddam out of Kuwait and largely because I could not envision how it would end well without removal of Saddam, which I and others suspected could create its own problems. We won easily on the battlefield and, for much of the media, that settled matters: the hawks were right, we doves were wrong. (It would be many years before we could say "see, this is what we were worried about"; even then hawks said that the problem was Bush pere's refusal to drive on into Baghdad even at the cost of fracturing the coalition that had made his victory possible. They can never be proven wrong.)
Noting again that our problem is that we don't (and probably won't) know what is really going on with Pakistan, and likely driving Obama's decision, here is our situation as activists:
(1) We know that Obama is going to go ahead, largely because of the institutional imperative. The system is set up to keep him from saying no.
(2) We know that the real issue is therefore less whether we go in than when, and how quickly, we come out.
(3) We therefore need to position ourselves not to win a debate in December 2009, but in March 2011. That's when Obama is going to need us to strengthen his spine.
(By the way, I anticipate comments saying "but so many people will die, on both sides, in the meantime, so many families ruined, so much treasure wasted, so much enmity creates -- how can you look at things so cold-bloodedly?" Yeah, I do know that many people will die, thanks. We can't stop that now. My answer to that criticism is that lives saved or lost and families ruined or not in decisions made in the spring of 2011 are as precious as those at stake right now -- and we're not going to win at this stage. We need to think a few steps ahead.)
My conclusion, then, even though I believe that Obama has thought about this deeply and sensitively and may have reasons that compelled his decision (though apparently they didn't convince Joe Biden), is that as an activist I have to oppose the escalation. If I'm wrong -- which we'll only know if whatever Obama tries appears successful -- then the world will just chalk it up to doves being dovish. We'll be able to say that Obama did not present the real and secret information about the situation in Pakistan that might have changed our minds. (In my case, that's literally true. I could support escalating if it made enough of a difference in Pakistan. That case hasn't been made.)
If the escalation doesn't work, though, then I want to be able to be able to face down the people who led Obama to make this decision. I want to be able to say, fifteen months from now:
"We told you this wouldn't work. He gave you pretty much everything you wanted. But the fact is that the Afghans are going to be in Afghanistan longer than we will. They know that they can wait us out. They know that the corrupt government will eventually topple, as in Vietnam and Iran and Cuba and elsewhere. We had no way to win in December 2009 and we have no way to win now."
Am I 100% convinced that this is true? As noted above, no. But it is my best guess based on the information I have available to me. And, if we don't show enough progress to allow withdrawal by June 2011, I am confident that it will be more demonstrably true then -- and that our political opponents, some within the Administration, will be saying that we just need another few years to make it work. We need to prepare now to counteract them later. If they are, unexpectedly, prove correct, we can always stand down. Our choices, too, will be determined by facts on the ground.
Conclusion
Not knowing what to think with confidence about Obama's best course in December 2009, I am choosing to prepare for a battle that's just as important and where I have more confidence about my stand: the battle over the best course in mid-2011. Obama will be hearing from lots of people from the other side about how, if things aren't going well, he can't show weakness, he can't pull back. That side of the argument will never be underrepresented. He'll need to be hearing at that time from people who told him at the time that this was going to end badly. He'll need to listen to them.
I oppose this war, but plan to do so respectfully of Obama's good will and bad circumstances. My anti-war stance now, even based on a close to equivocal analysis of what will really happen in 18 months following the escalation, is my way of adding one more voice to those people from whom Obama will need to hear on down the line, when he considers withdrawal from what will then actually be his war.
He'll need my voice then to create political room for him to move against the institutional imperative to keep the war going. I think that at that later time he will need me -- and people like you -- to tell him that that would be making a mistake, and to remind him that they told him earlier that he was making a mistake. Eighteen months from now, Obama will need a peace movement to pressure him to do the right thing. I'm signing up to be part of it now.
In other words, I oppose the President's policies out of a deep sense of loyalty. I fear that war proponents will continue to draw him into a politically fatal trap -- and I want to see him re-elected.