Yesterday, I posted my three serious questions about our Afghanistan strategy:
- Are the Afghans for whom we are ostensibly fighting capable of unifying and governing the country?
- Which side of this fight is more determined to win?
- Does it matter to our national security who governs Afghanistan?
I only got a few comments, but they were very sharp observations and I thank the Kos community for the insights.
Today, given that for me the answers to the above questions make a strong case for America to begin ending our military mission in Afghanistan, I want ask the question what will President Obama do?
As I pointed out in yesterday's post, there are troubling similarities between our involvement in Afghanistan today and our involvement in Vietnam in the 60s. No two wars are the same, but the similarities are apparent:
-- We have an untrustworthy and corrupt governing partner.
-- We are confronting a determined foe.
-- We seem to be allowing a broader national fear -- in this case terrorism, in the case of Vietnam communism -- to inject hyperbole in the national debate and to cloud our national judgment.
-- We have an incredibly intelligent, new, young president who inherited a mess from a previous administration and who seems eager to prove his toughness and who escalates U.S. military involvement.
-- We have an end-game that depends largely on the willingness of ordinary civilians to assume responsibility for their own future, but it's not clear that these civilians support our goals.
-- We have a history of a people who very much resent foreign occupation and have proven again and again to resist foreign military powers.
-- We have at best lukewarm support from many of our most important international allies on our policy, and are essentially shouldering much of the burden alone.
There are very clear differences, as well. Perhaps the most important of which is that the Taliban are not nearly as popular among the peasant population as were the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong.
And, there is virtually no scenario under which we would ever deploy anything close to 500,000 troops into the battle as we did in Vietnam.
Still, the similarities are striking and very troubling.
Which brings me to President Obama. He has staked a significant bet on the surge and on the counter-insurgency strategy that is being carried out as we speak.
With the troop surge nearly complete and Obama's strategy well under way, where do we go from here?
President Obama has announced his plans to review this policy by the end of the year and is committed to start bringing down the number of U.S. troops next year. However, the big question will be what pace will Obama set for troop withdrawal and what more do we hope to accomplish in Afghanistan.
There appears to be debate in the administration on both of these points. Vice President Biden has emphasized a limited engagement focused on fighting al Qaeda and with a harder deadline for beginning withdrawal. Defense Secretary Gates and General Petraeus have emphasized the word flexibility when talking about deadlines and seem to be pressing for a more open-ended commitment.
To get a sense of the difficulty we continue to confront as we try to stand up the Afghan government, this blurb from a recent Washington Post article underscores the point:
A recent effort by Karzai's local-governance directorate to fill 300 civil service jobs in Kandahar and the surrounding district turned up four qualified applicants, even after the agency dropped its application standards to remove a high school diploma, according to several U.S. officials.
The main impediment is security. Afghans don't want to work for their government or U.S. development contractors in such an unsafe environment. But if the government and contractors cannot employ qualified workers, the government cannot deliver services and will be unable to win the population's allegiance, a prerequisite for improved security.
And just a few paragraphs later, there is this pleasant report:
In the Panjwai district to the west of Kandahar, U.S. officials say, the district governor and the police chief recently got into a fight. The chief hit the governor with a teakettle and the governor smashed a teacup on the chief's head, the confrontation culminating in a shootout between their guards.
And then there is this:
In Arghandab, U.S. military and civilian officials spent a year working closely with -- and praising -- the district governor, Abdul Jabar. When he was killed in a car bombing in Kandahar this summer, the officials blamed the Taliban.
But some of those same officials concluded that the governor was skimming U.S. funds for reconstruction projects in his district. His killing, they think, was the result of anger by fellow residents over his not distributing the spoils, not a Taliban assassination.
"It was a mob hit," said one U.S. official familiar with the situation. "We saw him as a white knight, but we were getting played the whole time."
These are just a few paragraphs from one story on what's happening in Afghanistan as America begins our 9th year on the ground. Granted, the first 8 years were run by the totally incompetent Bushies. But, these anecdotes and many others paint a picture of a country that may frankly be ungovernable, a point made by one commenter to my post yesterday.
Will President Obama see this picture and understand the futility of our efforts on the ground in Afghanistan? Will he listen to and follow the advice of VP Biden? Or will the military brass win him over to a continued, ongoing, virtually open-ended heavy American footprint?
To me, it's an easy call. But, then again, I'm not president.