"Come Home, America" Watch, Day 18

It's an Afghanistan trial balloon a day from the Obama administration. Today's is the lead of a comprehensive glimpse of the President's mind, courtesy the AP:

President Barack Obama is prepared to accept some Taliban involvement in Afghanistan's political future and will determine how many more U.S. troops to send to the war based only on keeping al-Qaida at bay, a senior administration official said Thursday.

Back in the day, that would've been Henry Kissinger whispering to the reporter in the parking garage. Today, whoever the senior leaker is, it probably means no Afghanistan surge as requested by Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It means that the Vice President, who favors maintaining current troops strengths while relying increasingly on counter-terrorism efforts to track down al-Qaeda and its enablers, may have the edge in the agonized reappraisal now so flamboyantly underway in the White House. It means we're probably coming home from Afghanistan over the next few years.

And it means Obama really is the new Nixon.

In January 1969, President Nixon took office with over half a million Americans fighting in Vietnam. The antiwar movement, an increasingly antiwar Democratic Congress, and voters' growing skepticism about the war convinced him that the U.S. would have to withdraw its troops and that South Vietnam would have to resist communist aggression by itself, albeit with continued U.S. aid and materiel. Interestingly, military historian Bob Sorley's account of how Mr. Nixon and his McChrystal, Gen. Creighton Abrams, prepared South Vietnamese forces to fight on their own is making the rounds at the Pentagon. Its principal teaching for Obama: Withdraw U.S. forces if you must, but train our allies well, and never, never, never let them run out of bullets as the Watergate Congress did South Vietnam in 1973-75.

Although the contention within the agonizing administration don't reflect well on the President Formerly Known As No-Drama, it probably couldn't be helped given the immensity of the policy shift he appears to be contemplating. Ever the wonk, he seemingly doesn't want to be confined by any prior assumption or statement, such as:

We're there, so we have to stay. I said this was the good war during the campaign, so we have to stay. I'll look weak if we go, so we have to stay. My critics say it's the front line in the battle against terrorism, even th0ugh I don't think it is, so we have to stay.

With the lives of so many Americans and Afghans in the balance, Obama should be commended and supported in his search for the right, as opposed to the easy, policy. It's as if he's learning in a few weeks of earnest confabs (beginning, I'm convinced, with the White House-sanctioned leak 18 days ago of the essentially pessimistic McChrystal report) what it took us from 1961-69 to learn from our experience in South Vietnam: It's ultimately up to the people of Afghanistan to determine, with appropriate support from their friends in the event of foreign interference, who their leaders are.

If a Taliban government, or one in which the Taliban share power, doesn't threaten our interests, then it's not a vital concern of ours -- though our heart must weep for Afghan women who may again be subject to Taliban-style Islamic apartheid. If Afghanistan does threaten our interests, then we have to be prepared to go back. After the Vietnamese communists began violating the Paris Peace Accords in the spring of 1973, President Nixon might well have resumed a significant U.S. role, via massive air strikes at least, but Watergate made it impossible. If Obama gets out of Afghanistan on his terms, as a popular President making a rational, careful call rather than a politically imperative one, it will be easier for us to return if necessary. The risk is that our re-intervention would end up being the result of a terrorist strike emanating from Afghanistan. Should we indeed deescalate the good war, the key question will be how vigilant and ruthless a counter-terrorist the President would be willing to be.

"Come Home, America" Watch

This week the Obama administration has signaled that it won't reduce the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and told the AP that there are fewer than 100 al-Qaeda fighters left there. The leak to Bob Woodward of the pessimistic McCrystal report, undoubtedly authorized by the White House, will turn out to have been the first signal of an historic decision to begin to wind down the eight-year-long Afghanistan war. It's the right call -- but a risky one, too, since Obama would be accountable for any new terrorist threat emanating from the bosom of a resurgent Taliban. How ruthless a counter-terrorist is he prepared to be?

Fat Chance, Max

Max Boot tells Republicans to back the President if he gives Gen. McCrystal what he's asking for in Afghanistan:

The president’s dedication is indeed open to question, but it’s still possible he may give McChrystal what he needs in order to win. If he does, conservatives would be well-advised to support the president rather than to engage in partisan carping as too many of them did during the 1990s while Bill Clinton was taking military action in Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Iraq, and elsewhere. Back then, some on the Right mindlessly adopted an isolationist stance simply because interventions were being ordered by a Democratic president. That is a mistake they should not repeat. Instead, “national security conservatives” should unite to support our troops and their battle-tested commanders as they try to turn around a failing war effort in Afghanistan.

Hat tip to Mike Cheever

Third Or Fourth Thoughts About Afghanistan

I still think someone may have leaked Gen. Stanley McCrystal's Afghanistan report with a wink, even a nudge, from the White House. If you focus on the need the report evinces for more troops, you may well think the leaker was a hawk. But if instead you focus on McChrystal's pessimism about our long-term prospects, then the leak nicely bolsters President Obama in agonized reappraisal mode. The New York Times today:

The sweeping [administration] reassessment has been prompted by deteriorating conditions on the ground, the messy and still unsettled outcome of the Afghan elections and a dire report by Mr. Obama’s new commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal. Aides said the president wanted to examine whether the strategy he unveiled in March was still the best approach and whether it could work with the extra combat forces General McChrystal wants.

In looking at other options, aides said, Mr. Obama might just be testing assumptions — and assuring liberals in his own party that he was not rushing into a further expansion of the war — before ultimately agreeing to the anticipated troop request from General McChrystal. But the review suggests the president is having second thoughts about how deeply to engage in an intractable eight-year conflict that is not going well.

War Killers

Glenn Greenwald reports about bloggers who think Gen. McCrystal's memo was leaked to build support for sending more troops to Afghanistan. That may be because people naturally assume that generals enjoy war, which is actually not true of most of those who have experienced it. The leak to Bob Woodward felt to me more like cautious military planners giving President Obama cover for getting out.

A Rescue, Not An Occupation

A friend who knows a lot more about Afghanistan than I do took umbrage at my call for a reduction of U.S. ground forces. I asked him if using counter-terrorism (CT) techniques to monitor, deter, attack, and eliminate active anti-U.S. terrorists in Afghanistan wouldn't be better than an open-ended commitment of ground forces. His reply:

In response to your query, look at the evidence from across the border in the tribal areas. How much success have we had there, including your conditionals, in light of the fact that this is a non-permissive environment? Now look at the Afghan side, a permissive environment, and measure the current presence of al-Qaeda. Then ask yourself how permissive that environment will be when we signal our intent to absquatulate? It will be an abandonment of a rescue, not an abandonment of an occupation, as made very clear by the only quote of a key Afghan in the [Gen. Stanley] McChrystal report:

I do not underestimate the enormous challenges in executing this new strategy; however, we have a key advantage: the majority of Afghans do not want a return of the Taliban. During consultations with Afghan Defense Minister Wardak, I found some of his writings insightful:

"Victory is within our grasp -- provided that we recommit ourselves based on lessons learned and provided that we fulfill the requirements needed to make success inevitable... I reject the myth advanced in the media that Afghanistan is a 'graveyard of empires' and that the U.S. and NATO effort is destined to fail. Afghans have never seen you as occupiers, even though this has been the major focus of the enemy's propaganda campaign. Unlike the Russians, who imposed a government with an alien ideology, you enabled us to write a democratic constitution and choose our own government. Unlike the Russians, who destroyed our country, you came to rebuild."

The above quote should be seen as debunking the tired conservative canard that manifests itself under isolationist cloak in every debate I've witnessed: They've been fighting for thousands of years! This was said of the encounters in the Middle East, Bosnia, Kosovo, etc. It is always historically false (they've usually been at peace for thousands of years, punctuated by violence caused by dynamics people are too reluctant to address). The current manifestation is the "graveyard of empires" construct. Even a cursory look at U.S. policy toward Afghanistan reveals -- and this is one of the things we tried to get right -- an attempt to partner, not occupy.

Do you believe that Afghans -- or any self-preserving people -- would continue to work with us if we break faith? And how does extending the insecurity of the tribal areas by several multiples of safe-haven support the argument that a CT strategy works?

I challenge the defeatism of the "open-ended" construction. McChrystal and others since the beginning have made clear that building Afghan security forces (ANA and ANP) is the ticket out. And the author of the poorly named Graveyard of Empires, RAND's Seth Jones, who is quite objective, clearly parses how we succeeded in building the ANA when we focused on it (and how we let that slip in the latter Bush years). The Afghans know how to fight and take very well to our training. We've built an army out of scratch (to approximately 90,000) in a few years of sustained commitment. Doubling that commitment, as Obama and McChrystal recognize is necessary, is the way to ensure that the Afghans will take responsibility for the security we are now leading. (Want to make any ARVN analogies?)

Memo To Bob

Again demonstrating his knack for prying confidences and insider information from deep within the military mind, Bob Woodward writes this morning about Gen. Stanley McChrystal's pessimistic Afghanistan report to President Obama. Andrew Sullivan's assessment:

[I]f McChrystal is right, he is strategizing Afghanistan as a semi-permanent protectorate for the US. This is empire in the 21st century sense: occupying failed states indefinitely to prevent even more chaos spinning out of them. And it has the embedded logic of all empires: if it doesn't keep expanding, it will collapse. The logic of McChrystal is that the US should be occupying Pakistan as well. And Somalia. And anywhere al Qaeda make seek refuge.

In the end, Gulliver cannot move. And his pockets are empty. Whom does that deter?

Why the leak? There are those who say (Len Colodny) that former naval intelligence officer Woodward functions in a, shall we say, quasi-official manner when reporting about military and intelligence affairs. Whether or not that's true, by making the 66-page report available to Woodward, someone at the Pentagon, at a top level and perhaps even with the White House's acquiescence, seems to have signaled that it's time to bail. As Woodward writes:

[McChrystal] plan could intensify a national debate in which leading Democratic lawmakers have expressed reluctance about committing more troops to an increasingly unpopular war. Obama said last week that he will not decide whether to send more troops until he has "absolute clarity about what the strategy is going to be."

However this morning's Washington Post story happened -- hustled-for leak or Pentagon press release -- it's a salutary development. The military mind understands better than most the perils of trying to accomplish in Afghanistan in the 21st century what the British and Russians could not in the 19th and 20th -- especially when there are better ways to battle al-Qaeda's shifting target. Let's not do the enemy the favor of getting bogged down yet again. Come home, America, from Kabul, at least.