Dispatches is on our site — on the war (what else?).
Tag: Barack Obama
Time to rethink Afghanistan
I interviewed Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films, which produces video documentaries on progressive subjects with the goal of distributing them on a grassroots basis, earlier this evening, before the president spoke. (It is for next week’s Dispatches.)
His film, “Rethink Afghanistan,” pretty much makes the case that our presence in Afghanistan is only inflaming the situation in Afghanistan.
Greenwald told me that the president is working on the “misguided notion that this was making us more secure.”
Obama, he said, “should look at the fundamental issues.” He echoed something I said in this week’s column (out tomorrow): That the internal debate essentially “was a travesty of a debate.”
“It was whether to have 10,000, 20,000 or 30 ,000 more troops,” he said. “It should have been asking why are we there what are our security interests. If al Qaida is enemy, then what is the most effective way to get the less than 100 members who are in Afghanistan.”
Just as importantly, he added this: “How do you justify the billions of billions of dollars (on the war) when there is not enough money for healthcare, for jobs, for housing.”
I wish the president could have talked with Greenwald before his speech tonight.
Say it ain’t so O
Any notion that President Barack Obama will be scaling back our military involvement in Afghanistan has now come to a crashing halt.
Obama, according to The New York Times, said today “it is his intention to “finish the job” that began with the overthrow of the Taliban government in the fall of 2001.”
Mr. Obama, offering a tantalizing preview of what looms as one of the momentous decisions of his presidency, said he would tell the American people about “a comprehensive strategy” embracing civilian and diplomatic efforts as well as the continuing military campaign.
While he avoided any hints of the new troop levels he foresees in Afghanistan, the president signaled that he will not be talking about a short-term commitment but rather an effort muscular enough to “dismantle and degrade” the enemy and ensure that “Al Qaeda and its extremist allies cannot operate” in the region.
A round of White House meetings on Afghanistan, which concluded on Monday night, included discussions about sending about 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, administration officials said. There are about 68,000 United States troops there now.
And now there will be more — and, despite the apparent inclusion of an “exit strategy,” they are going to be there for a long, long time.
The decision to double down on Afghanistan comes at a moment when the war has lost support among the American people and it is becoming clearer by the day that continued fighting will do little more than further inflame the situation.
A piece in the Sunday Times’ Week In Review by Robert Wright, author of an important
overview of religious history called The Evolution of God (I am reading it now and find it fascinating), offers a glimpse into the potential side-effects of this unnecessary remedy to our security ills.
These could include the creation of homegrown terrorists. Wright, focusing on the horrible case of “Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan and the Fort Hood massacre,” says — quoting the argument of dovish liberals — attempting to end terrorism by killing terrorists is counterproductive. It actually does more to spread terrorism than to stop it.
One reason killing terrorists can spread terrorism is that various technologies — notably the Internet and increasingly pervasive video — help emotionally powerful messages reach receptive audiences. When American wars kill lots of Muslims, inevitably including some civilians, incendiary images magically find their way to the people who will be most inflamed by them.
This calls into question our nearly obsessive focus on Al Qaeda — the deployment of whole armies to uproot the organization and to finally harpoon America’s white whale, Osama bin Laden. If you’re a Muslim teetering toward radicalism and you have a modem, it doesn’t take Mr. bin Laden to push you over the edge. All it takes is selected battlefield footage and a little ad hoc encouragement: a jihadist chat group here, a radical imam there — whether in your local mosque or on a Web site in your local computer.
If this is the case — and I believe it is — then the Afghanistan war and our incursions into Pakistan and potentially other hot spots becomes a game of “Wack-a-Mole.” Each time a mole pops up from its hole and we smash it, another mole pops up from another hole.
Bulking up our mission in Afghanistan, therefore, will do little to alter this and could do much to exacerbate it.
As Wright points out,
Central to the debate over Afghanistan is the question of whether terrorists need a “safe haven” from which to threaten America. If so, it is said, then we must work to keep every acre of Afghanistan (and Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, etc.) out of the hands of groups like the Taliban. If not — if terrorists can orchestrate a 9/11 about as easily from apartments in Germany as from camps in Afghanistan — then maybe never-ending war isn’t essential.
However you come out on that argument, the case of Nidal Hasan shows one thing for sure: Homegrown American terrorists don’t need a safe haven. All they need is a place to buy a gun.
I’m not arguing that we should ignore terrorism. On the contrary, we should address it using a law-enforcement model, which would require a greater reliance on intelligence gathering and investigation, while also focusing on international economic development and aid.
There is another drawback to Obama’s apparent “surge”: It will derail his domestic agenda, sucking dollars from the treasury while weakening support for the president at home. LBJ is the model for this, of course, as Bill Moyers reminded us last week, when he made the connection between Vietnam and Afghanistan and LBJ and Obama:
Now in a different world, at a different time, and with a different president, we face the prospect of enlarging a different war. But once again we’re fighting in remote provinces against an enemy who can bleed us slowly and wait us out, because he will still be there when we are gone.
Once again, we are caught between warring factions in a country where other foreign powers fail before us. Once again, every setback brings a call for more troops, although no one can say how long they will be there or what it means to win. Once again, the government we are trying to help is hopelessly corrupt and incompetent.
And once again, a President pushing for critical change at home is being pressured to stop dithering, be tough, show he’s got the guts, by sending young people seven thousand miles from home to fight and die, while their own country is coming apart.
And once again, the loudest case for enlarging the war is being made by those who will not have to fight it, who will be safely in their beds while the war grinds on. And once again, a small circle of advisers debates the course of action, but one man will make the decision.
We will never know what would have happened if Lyndon Johnson had said no to more war. We know what happened because he said yes.
I hope Obama is not following the path blazed by LBJ. That would be a tragedy for all of us.
Is the hope running out?
A story in today’s issue of The New York Times offers a glimpse into the dangers the Obama administration faces as he attempts to move forward, as many in the nation begin to lose faith in the promise he offered.
While I believe he remains popular, his standing with the public has been in flux, dependent not only on what has been awful coverage of the political moment and the bad faith of the opposition party, but also some of his own flaws — his cautiousness, his commitment to bipartisanship at the expense of action.
His willingness to leave the healthcare debate in the hands of Congress — more specifically, in the hands of so-called Blue Dog Democrats and conservative Democrats like Max Baucus — left liberals negotiating from a position of weakness, with the more progressive reforms being taken off the table before negotiations started.
We are still at war and it appears that we may soon see an escalation in Afghanistan, a move that would shatter his connection to the progressive wing of his party and those elements of the left that had signed on. Escalation also would drive away many independents, leaving his coalition in tatters and his presidency looking far too much like the last months of the Johnson administration.
There is time to turn this around, to act boldly and move the nation in a more humane direction, but he’s got to act quickly. There already is a palpable sense out there that the promises he made cannot be kept.
The
Nobel offers sur-Prizes: What were they thinking?
The folks at the Nobel Prize committee really outdid themselves this year. Not only did they award a literature prize to what appears to be a minor Eastern European writer, they’ve given the Peace prize to President Barack Obama on the grounds that he has remade the international community.
President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” a stunning honor that came less than nine months after he made United States history by becoming the country’s first African-American president.
The award, announced in Oslo by the Nobel Committee while much of official
Washington — including the president — was still asleep, cited in particular the
president’s efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons.“He has created a new international climate,” the committee said.
He has? Look, I think he is a drastic improvement over the arrogant fool who sat in the Oval Office for the last eight years, but I can’t help but wonder whether the Nobel committee has allowed the previous administration’s failures to distort its view of the current president.
The fact remains that he has been office a little less than nine months and has accomplished little on the world stage. He may be committed to nuclear abolition, but so far all we have to show for that is some harsh words for Iran, some general goals and some talking.
On a separate but related point, I find it difficult to accept the awarding of a peace prize to a president who is still considering a troop buildup in Afghanistan.
Hank Kalet 