In an interview on The Real News Network, retired CIA officer Ray McGovern suggests that Afghanistan is likely to become "Obama's Viet Nam":
Iraq may have been Bush's Viet Nam, but I think McGovern is correct in his concern that Afghanistan will turn out to be Obama's.
The US is an empire in decline. The Neo-Cons sought to leverage US military superiority to compensate for fading US economic, cultural, and political hegemony. It didn't work. The US is presently fighting two wars with no reasonable prospect for victory. Obama's candidacy was made by his opposition to the Iraq war, but he is no less a loyalist to the prerogatives of empire than his competitors were. He has sought to demonstarte this by promising to transfer troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, which enough liberals still think of as "the good war" even though it is really just another war of occupation propping up a collection of warlords and religious fanatics distinguished only by their willingness to be propped up by the US. In the meantime the predictable aerial bombardments of weddings and the like that occur in every situation like this are driving more and more people back into the arms of the hated Taleban.
Obama promises to wage this war "smarter." But the logic of the situation can not be evaded. The US will have no more success maintaining a stable and reliable pro-US regime in Afghanistan than Alexander the Great, the British Empire or the Soviet Union. No amount of money for schools or water systems will make the shit of living under foreign occupation stop stinking.
Its clear from his appointments that the old national security state apparatus has a firm grip on Obama's ear. From their point of view, no price is too high to avoid the embarassment of a US withdrawal defeat in BOTH Iraq and Afghanistan. the problem of course is that THEY aren't paying the price. Its being paid first by the Iraqi and Afghan peoples and then by us.
As with Viet Nam, the American people have a pivotal role to play in raising the political costs of continuing this war. We need to be in the streets raising hell and refusing to give Obama any more than a one-week honeymoon on these wars that will with certainty sink any possible progressive domestic agenda people think Obama is going to deliver. In order to do so, good liberals are going to have to do with Obama what they did with the Democrats during Viet Nam, that is to say dispense with the illusions that they can be counted on to do the right thing if left to their own devices. The world can't afford that sort of naivete on any of our parts.
