I was on my way to a sweat-lodge ceremony when last week's WikiLeaks blockbuster broke and missed much of the media and blogworld discussion on the subject. Some catch-up reading shows me the leak generated another firestorm that split Democrats, pissed off the White House and offered the rancid spectacle of neo-conservatives at The Weekly Standard pontificating about the moral responsibilities of The New York Times on publishing the leaks the same week the Standard front-paged a despicable piece by Reuel Marc Gerecht titled "Should Israel Bomb Iran? Better safe than sorry."
Whatever one thinks of Julian Assange's decision to release the tens of thousands of secret documents his organization had acquired, it didn't take that leak to prove to most liberals that the Obama administration's double surge of 68,000 troops over the past 15 months was a terrible move that will have terrible consequences. President Obama was quite right earlier in the week to say that nothing in those documents (at least nothing seen so far) provides anything more than details about what was already widely known or suspected. But, just as was the case during the Vietnam War when secrets were exposed, the WikiLeaks documents show it's not true that citizens who oppose the war would not do so if they knew what the government knows. Because what the government knows, we in the opposition to the war already knew.
In today's Times, in recalling what occurred around the release of the Pentagon Papers 39 years ago, Frank Rich says the American public has already made its decision on the Afghanistan war:
The public’s reaction to the Afghanistan war logs has largely been a shrug — and not just because they shared their Times front page with an article about Chelsea Clinton’s wedding. President Obama is, to put it mildly, no Nixon, and his no-drama reaction to the leaks robbed their publication of the constitutional cliffhanger of their historical antecedent. Another factor in the logs’ shortfall as public spectacle is the fractionalization of the news media, to the point where even a stunt packaged as “news” can trump journalistic enterprise. (Witness how the bogus Shirley Sherrod video upstaged The Washington Post’s blockbuster investigation of the American intelligence bureaucracy two weeks ago.) The logs also suffer stylistically: they’re often impenetrable dispatches from the ground, in contrast to the Pentagon Papers’ anonymously and lucidly team-written epic of policy-making on high.
Yet the national yawn that largely greeted the war logs is most of all an indicator of the country’s verdict on the Afghan war itself, now that it’s nine years on and has reached its highest monthly casualty rate for American troops. Many Americans at home have lost faith and checked out. The war places way down the list of pressing issues in every poll. Nearly two-thirds of those asked recently by CBS News think it’s going badly; the latest Post-ABC News survey finds support of Obama’s handling of Afghanistan at a low (45 percent), with only 43 percent deeming the war worth fighting.
That, of course, does not mean the Afghanistan war is over. Most Americans were against the Vietnam War by 1969, yet the slaughter continued with American participation for another four years. So, the headline on Rich's column - "Kiss This War Goodbye" - may well be premature. While it is, as Rich writes, difficult to imagine that at least some U.S. troops won't be coming home by this time next year, it's not how many will leave that is the big question but rather how many will stay and for how long. The guy who is in charge of that war on the ground right now, General David Petraeus, has in the past said that counterinsurgency wars take nine to 10 years to win.
But that's when one approach is adopted and stuck with. Already, just since December when the second surge was approved, a new approach seems to be getting more emphasis, according to Helene Cooper and Mark Landler at the Times:
Eight months later, that counterinsurgency strategy has shown little success, as demonstrated by the flagging military and civilian operations in Marja and Kandahar and the spread of Taliban influence in other areas of the country.
Instead, what has turned out to work well is an approach American officials have talked much less about: counterterrorism, military-speak for the targeted killings of insurgents from Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Faced with that reality, and the pressure of a self-imposed deadline to begin withdrawing troops by July 2011, the Obama administration is starting to count more heavily on the strategy of hunting down insurgents. The shift could change the nature of the war and potentially, in the view of some officials, hasten a political settlement with the Taliban.
The counterterrorism approach looks more like what Vice President Joe Biden proposed last year. General Petraeus's counterinsurgency proposal won out then.
The evolving thinking comes at a time when the lack of apparent progress in the nearly nine-year war is making it harder for Mr. Obama to hold his own party together on the issue. And it raises questions about whether the administration is seeking a rationale for reducing troop levels as scheduled starting next summer even if the counterinsurgency strategy does not show significant progress by then.
If the Times' reporters are right, that rationalization would be based on killing enough al Qaeda leaders to spur Taliban leaders into negotiating with the widely despised Hamid Karzai government. Less than five months from now, when the December assessment of U.S. Afghan policy is made by the White House, we'll see how that effort has panned out.
In the latest edition of The New York Review of Books, Garry Wills writes about his June 2009 dinner meeting with eight other historians, President Obama and three presidential staffers:
Obama need not wonder about his legacy, even this early. It is already fixed, and in one word: Afghanistan. He took on what he made America’s longest war and what may turn out to be its most disastrous one. ...
When my turn [to say my piece to the President] came, I joined those who had already warned him about an Afghanistan quagmire. I said that a government so corrupt and tribal and drug-based as Afghanistan’s could not be made stable. He replied that he was not naïve about the difficulties but he thought a realistic solution could be reached. I wanted to add “when pigs fly,” but restrained myself.
Jonathan Alter, in The Promise, becomes almost rhapsodic when describing the President’s official Afghanistan review sessions, to reach “the most methodical security decision in a generation.” But no one in those meetings said that the Afghanistan war was a sure loser, a thing not to be pursued in the first place. The only voice of dissent that we know of was Vice President Biden’s calling for a smaller troop increase (ten or fifteen thousand or so) and more drone attacks. The main point made by the historians he consulted was not referred to by Alter—one of the deleterious effects of governmental secrecy. The President might have been saved from the folly that will be his lasting legacy. But now we are ten years into a war that could drag on for another ten, and could catch in its trammels the next president, the way Vietnam tied up president after president.
Much is made of Franklin Roosevelt's comment to activists when they came asking him to take a specific action. He is supposed to have said: "I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it."
The left has had little success in "making" President Obama do anything. But for its sake, for the sake of our country, and for the sake of the President himself, we should be fully engaged in making him withdraw from Afghanistan with all due haste. Victory is undefined outside of slogans, America's "ally" in Kabul is incorrigible and incompetent, America's "ally" in Pakistan is funding and advising the enemy, America's allies in NATO with the exception of Britain have plans for their own withdrawals, and the war is corrosive both domestically and abroad. If an effective change could be achieved, a case could be made for staying the course. But continuing down the current path has no benefits for anyone, including Afghans who aren't warlords or otherwise plugged into the power elite.