Yeah, about that war

So, yesterday there was a local protest against the war in Afghanistan, which I attended with my friend. Along with about eight other people (although one of them may have only joined to bum smokes). Not sure if there actually was a "march", as my friend and I decided that entering a pub for a cool beverage was a better use of a Sunday.
Afghanistan is certainly no Vietnam, as the lack of a real "anti-war" movement proves, but we've been fighting this stupid thing for eleven years now. Has anybody noticed?
It's a sad commentary when even an old hippie like me finds himself drinking beer and watching football instead of protesting...but at least my beloved 49ers won big.
And, later, we had a really good pizza.

Speech Response

I'm going to disagree with my friend Justin a bit about Obama's Afghanistan speech. Not that I'm sold that the plan for Afghanistan is a good plan; it isn't. But it may be the 'least bad' plan that can realistically be implemented at this time.
Obama inherited a complete disaster in Afghanistan. The original goal of destroying Al Qaeda was abandoned in favor of a war in Iraq, and our forces in Afghanistan were left floundering for years without a strategy or the resources to carry out a plan. The puppet government is both corrupt and impotent, and the history of regional tribalism limits the potential for local allies. In short, we're in a hell of a mess.
But simply leaving Afghanistan would be even more dangerous. Aside from the humanitarian disaster that would follow, there is the very real threat of a terrorist haven on the border of a nuclear state that is itself unstable. Abandoning the Af/Pak chaos would greatly increase the risk of future attacks around the world.
So the situation is simply: damned if you leave, damned if you stay, damned if you escalate, damned if you draw down. Obama's plan has some of each; an escalation followed by a draw down, an increased focus on Pakistan, and an attempt to create a working government in Afghanistan. Stabilization, followed by a transition out of Afghanistan.
The speech itself was classic Obama. The tone was clear and somber, with a somewhat intellectual emphasis. While there were the requisite platitudes and rhetoric, Obama articulated his plans and goals with a level of clarity and honesty that the previous president was incapable of. As speeches go, it was strong and effective, and it probably pleased no one. Criticism is already pouring in from both the left and the right.
Will the strategy work? We'll see, but what we had been doing clearly wasn't working. Given the options currently available, Obama's choice is quite plausible. We'll see if it's workable.

Afghanistan Assessment

I think that Steve Hynde of The NewsHoggers has a very good assessment of the administration's thinking on Afghanistan, so I'm passing it on:

There's been a substantial change in Obama administration rhetoric in the last week or two, which has only accelerated after Gen. Eikenberry put his spanner in the escalationists' works. Hillary Clinton, talking to ABC News this Sunday, gives the clearest indication yet that the administration is looking for an exit.

"We're not interested in staying in Afghanistan. We have no long-term stake there. We want that to be made very clear," she told ABC news.

"We agree that our goal here is to defeat Al-Qaeda. That has been a clear goal and a mission from the president ever since he made his commitment of additional troops back in the spring."

"And we understand that the Afghans themselves need help in order to defend themselves against the Taliban. Those are mutually reinforcing missions but our highest obligation is to the American people," she said.

Gone is any talk of being there for as long as it takes to defeat the Taliban, or of success being something that "we'll know it when we see it". Instead, the Taliban are clearly Afghanistan's problem and Al Qaeda is America's - and a "mission accomplished" banner can be hung around the latter, at least as far as Afghanistan goes.

Here's what I now expect when Obama finally announces his decision: Afghanistan will get "help in order to defend themselves against the Taliban", more troops but the bulk with a clear training mission, and at the same time Karzai will be handed a three to five year set of benchmarks and a timetable for U.S. withdrawal.

Obama has no intention of heading into the 2012 election with no end in sight on Afghanistan. Thankfully, political necessity in this case matches with the smart thing to do strategically.

http://www.newshoggers.com/blog/2009/11/hillary-prepares-the-ground-for-an-exit-timetable.html

By stressing the need for an exit strategy rather than endless escalation, Obama is clearly trying to stay (somewhat) true to his campaign positions. And trying to get re-elected in 2012.

An Afghanistan Plan

Four plans were proposed. All four were rejected. All four plans were "escalation" plans, calling for different levels of troop increases, without any "exit strategy"; sort of "surge 2.0" with permanent occupation of Afghanistan as a result. Not what president Obama was looking for.

President Obama is pushing his national security team for more detail about an exit strategy for U.S. forces fighting in Afghanistan.

The president met with his advisers Wednesday to chart new strategy for the war. Obama went into this latest strategy session with what the White House had called four "final" options on the table.

Each involved sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, but would require different troop levels and would embrace different goals for the U.S. involvement there.

At the high end, there's the 40,000 or so troops that the top commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, says he needs to pull off a successful counter-insurgency. At the low end, an option of 10,000 extra troops, mostly working as trainers for the Afghan army and police force. One middle option would focus on a narrower, counter-terrorism mission, while another, said to be endorsed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, backs sending 34,000 or so extra U.S. troops while calling on NATO to contribute several thousand more.

After the 2 1/2 hour meeting Wednesday, two administration officials told NPR that the president does not plan to accept any of the options in their current form. The officials said the president pushed his team for more detail about an exit strategy for U.S. forces. They said he wants to make clear to the Afghan government that the U.S. commitment is not open-ended.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120336017

Here's the real question that needs to be answered: What the hell are we trying to achieve in Afghanistan? Are our goals realistic or attainable? Because just sending more troops in the name of "winning" is merely a repeat of the mistake of Vietnam. Professor Cole explains:

Obama is said to have rejected all the plans so far presented to him, insofar as none leads to a foreseeable end-game.

If AP is right, this development is encouraging. All along, the things missing from Washington's plans for Afghanistan have been a firm, specific set of goals, a detailed means of attaining them, and a way to know when they have been attained.

How unlikely the big counter-insurgency dreams of some military analysts are to result in success is apparent in this recent Frontline report, in which the US military outpost in a village in Helmand never succeeds in getting the locals to open a single shop in the bazaar under US protection, and never succeeds in stopping the constant sniping at them by Taliban forces.

http://www.juancole.com/

Cole: Let's back up and talk about what the goal is in Afghanistan. Your strategy and your tactics are going to come out of your goal. I'm a little bit afraid that, in regard to the goal, you see a lot of mission creep. The goal has become standing up an Afghan government and an Afghan military that's relatively stable and can control the country. There's a lot of state-building involved in that.

I am a severe skeptic on this score. I don't think that's a proper goal for the U.S. military. I think we are dealing with a tribal society of people who, as a matter of course, are organized by clan and have feuds with each other, and feuds with other tribes, and feuds with their cousins. I think that Washington misinterprets this feuding as Talibanism, and thinks that if you put a lot of troops in there, you can pacify the country and settle it down.

I just think it is a misreading of the character of the country. Afghanistan is a country where localism is important, where people don't like the central government coming in and bothering them. There's a sense in which the communist government of the 1980s, backed by the Soviet Union, wanted to drag Afghanistan kicking and screaming into the late 20th century, and to do that you had to impose central government policy on the countryside and on the villagers. And the villagers rose up and kicked the Soviets and the communists out. They were outraged, in part, against the centralizing tendency of Kabul.

So, I just think that Afghanistan is a country that needs a light touch. You just have to accept that there's going to be a certain amount of disorder in the countryside as long as people are organized tribally. And if you put 100,000 or 150,000 Western troops in there, that's just more people to feud with.

Finding an exit strategy for Afghanistan will be more challenging than it was for Iraq. At least Iraq had an infrastructure (albeit dysfunctional) prior to our invasion, so setting up a semblance of a government and leaving is actually attainable. No such infrastructure exists in Afghanistan, and it would be delusional to think we can build one. Again, Professor Cole:

Cole: If you are asking what I think is a plausible goal, I'd say it is training an Afghan army and police force as best you can. But you are just going to have to accept that it's going to be a weak government. You can shore it up to some extent, but you need to shore it up behind the scenes. It can't be seen to be a puppet government, because that will undermine its legitimacy.

A government that can provide more services to people is good. Road building is good. Encouraging the markets to open is good. But as far as fighting what the U.S. is calling Taliban, they are really just regional warlords. They might have a tactical alliance with the old Taliban of Mullah Omar, but it's a mistake to sweep them all up into a single category . . . '

As with Iraq, getting out will be much more difficult than getting in. Shrub, the idiot, was content to invade and then wage war without end, but now Obama is stuck with trying to clean up this mess. The reality is that there are no easy ways out of Afghanistan: simply pulling out would leave behind an 'opium and terrorist' incubator as well as a humanitarian hell, but blind escalation merely postpones the inevitable while further draining American lives and wealth. In the end, we will leave Afghanistan; the question is really what we leave behind and when we leave it. Not an easy choice.
So I support Obama's decision to reject the current proposals. I only hope he can come up with a workable plan that will actually work to get us out of Afghanistan.
(for the purposes of this post, I'm not addressing what a huge mistake it was to start these wars; the past cannot be changed: we're there. The question is what to do now.)