Let me begin with the conclusion:
There are reports that Obama has refused to sign off on any plan until his advisers tell him how they propose to end the expanded war they advocate. But this sounds like just another way of saying: Tell me how we're going to fix the mistake we're about to make.
As long as our goals in Afghanistan remain as elusive as they are now, Obama shouldn't be sending troops. He should be bringing them out.
So writes Pulitzer Prize winner Eugene Robinson in Time to head home, his November 13th Washington Post column. I will both explore the column and offer a very few thoughts of my own.
The context of the column is Obama's continuing examination of options in Afghanistan, and his apparent rejection of the four options presented him by his military advisors, all of which apparently included substantial increases in forces on the ground in that theater, and all of which the President has apparently rejected. King rightly also frames this by noting Obama's visits to Dover and to Arlington National Cemetery. In the latter visit, as Robinson notes, the president
took an unscheduled walk among the rows of marble headstones in Section 60, where the dead from our two ongoing wars are buried.
Robinson immediately follows this by saying Obama should keep those visits in mind as he decides, because
Geopolitical calculation has human consequences. Sending more troops will mean more coffins arriving at Dover, more funerals at Arlington, more stress and hardship for military families. It would be wrong to demand such sacrifice in the absence of military goals that are clear, achievable and worthwhile.
And what goals in Afghanistan remotely satisfy those criteria?
Robinson explores somewhat the implications of the cables sent by ambassador Karl Eickenberry. I believe Robinson mistakenly awards Eikenberry a 4th star - my memory is that at the time of his appointment as Ambassador he was retiring as a Lieutenant General. Nevertheless, given that Eikenberry was military commander in Afghanistan in 2006-2007, the doubts he has about sending more troops should certainly provide some cover for Obama should he decide to take a different path.
Robinson also writes about the cost on the troops and the nation of our commitment to two large overseas conflicts simultaneously, and properly note that
any new deployment would come at a heavy cost -- a human cost -- far beyond the billions of dollars required to train, equip, transport and maintain the units being sent.
I do not think Robinson provides all of what we need to understand. That is, I think there is even a more basic case to be made, a more important rethinking of strategy. In a piece entitled We Have A President Andrew Sullivan also reacts to the news that the President has rejected all four of the options presented to by his military leaders, describes the contents of the leaked Eikenberry cables as showing "stunning honesty." Sullivan also a few days ago offered some relevant words in From 9/11 To Fort Hood from which I would like to quopte the following:
The awful truth is: what 9/11 revealed, and what it was designed to reveal, is that there is nothing we can really do definitively to stop another one. They had no weapons but our own technology. The training they had was not that sophisticated and the costs of the operation were relatively tiny. There were 19 of them. None of the key perpetrators has been brought to justice. Bin Laden remains at large. If you calculate the costs of that evil attack against the financial, moral and human costs of the fight back, 9/11 was a fantastic demonstration of the power of asymmetry to destroy the West.
Everything that has subsequently transpired has merely deepened that lesson. The US is now bankrupt, trapped in Iraq and Afghanistan for the rest of our lives, unable even to prevent the two most potentially dangerous Islamist states, Pakistan and Iran, from getting nukes, morally compromised and hanging on to global support only because of a new president who is even now being assaulted viciously at home for such grievous crimes as trying to get more people access to health insurance.
Our reasons for going into Afghanistan were to go after those responsible for perpetuating the attacks of 9/11 and punish them, as well as those offering them sanctuary - had Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, agreed to turn over Osama bin Laden and the other leaders of Al Qaeda we would hav lacked the requisite causus bell to have invaded. When we are being told that Al Qaeda is now down to perhaps 100 people and they are in Pakistan, not Afghanistan, when the government we seek to prop up in Afghanistan is so corrupt that increasing the people over whom it tries to exert authority prefer the that of the resurgent Taliban, there is something greatly wrong with having our troops at risk. The only current threat to the US from Afghanistan is the spread of heroin from the poppy fields, and that certainly should not justify the human and financial costs of a major military commitment.
I think Sullivan raises a key point, one which too often is not part of the discussion: how does the application of massive military force make us safer from asymmetric attacks from those willing to die in the carrying out such attacks? It does not, and the damage and suffering we cause by the application of such force merely engenders further hostility, further willingness to risk life and limb to strike back at us: remember that before our invasion of Iraq there was no Al Qaeda or equivalent there, and now there is. And from the Iraqi point of view, there was little internal violence, and now the people there - and increasingly the people in Afghanistan - are subject to insecurity and worse, loss of normality of living, and we our military presence is seen as the prime reason.
We are asking our military men and women to suffer hardships and separation from family, encounter PTSD and TBI, die or become broken physically, and for what? What clear national security interest is being achieved by the troops we have there now? What clear national security interest could be achieved by sending more? When will we face the real issues, and understand the cost this is imposing upon us.
The US is now bankrupt as Sullivan writes. We hear voices demanding that we spend even more resources - financial and human - at the same time they tell us we cannot afford to offer the assurance of health care to our own citizens, when some Senators are arguing that our financial situation is so dire that we must slash current parts of the social net, limiting benefits and/or privatizing parts of the system.
Lynodn Johnson's Great Society was limited because of the costs, financial and otherwise, of the expansion in Vietnam. The opportunity to financially, socially, and morally heal our nation and our society are at severe risk because of our commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Afghanistan has been the graveyard of many empires. It does not have a functioning national government. We cannot be an imperium imposing our will upon the unwilling residents of that still very tribal society.
For these, and for so many other reasons, Robinson points in the right direction. As far as Afghanistan, the task before the President should not be how many more troops to send. Rather, it should be how quickly we can bring home the troops already there.
The future of this nation, economically as well as morally, may depend on how we answer that question. I hope the answer is based at least in part on my final salutation.
Peace.