the bottom line is that as much as i am opposed to an "afghan surge" it's been pretty much inevitable since the election. also the fact that it would be a 30,000 troop increase had leaked out prior to the speech. really the only thing that i was interested in hearing is: (1) an explanation of what the president thinks the u.s. is trying to accomplish in afghanistan, and (2) a clear end game (that is, a clear articulation of how and when the u.s. will leave).
with regard to #1, the president basically repeated the explanations that i think, quite frankly, don't hold up to any serious scrutiny. denying al-qaeda safe havens doesn't make much sense because there are so many potential safe havens out there, the u.s. can't possibly deny them every one. if we assume that the u.s. could somehow completely eliminate all safe havens in afghanistan, anti-u.s. militants would just move to the tribal areas of pakistan, or somalia, or southern algeria, or northern mali, et cetera. the cost of relocating operations for al qaeda is low and the cost to the u.s. to clear a safe haven is high. that's a game of whack-a-mole that can't possibly be won by the u.s., even if we assume that completely "eliminating safe havens" is ever possible anywhere. it's a fool's errand.
which brings me to #2. with a goal that can never be completely achieved how can we have an end game? the president answer is that we won't have to achieve it because eventually we'll turn over the job to afghan forces. that "eventually" will begin in roughly 18 months.
on the one hand, i'm glad he set a vague timeline for when forces should expect to leave. but i'm only glad about that because of the low low bar set by the prior administration of refusing to talk about leaving in any fashion. topping george bush in articulating an end game to a military operation is like beating a blind man in a vision test. and it's pretty amusing to watch the right slam obama for giving even his tepid 18 months figure. the right spent much of the 1990s slamming clinton's military excusions in the former yugoslavia and somalia (although technically, that was originally bush the first's excusion) because they had no clear exist strategy. the W years seem to have made "no exit strategy to military operations" one of those unbreakable principles of rightwing doctrine, like the idea that cutting taxes is appropriate under every circumstance.
but i digress.
getting back to obama's strategy, his goal of beginning to remove troops after 18 months just isn't good enough, especially because the goal (eliminating safe havens and propping up the karzai government) can never be definitively achieved 100%. likewise with the training of afghan forces. who can say when that's done? the president has promised to "begin" to bring troops home after 18 months, but hasn't said when that will finish. when we hit that 18 month mark it will be very easy to delay because someone can always point to some remote region of the country and say "what about those safe havens over here?" or to some dilapidated afghan army unit to argue that the training mission needs more time.
by view of where afghanistan went wrong is basically what matthew yglesias said last week:
The main reason policy toward Afghanistan is so vexing, in my view, is that we basically failed in our main mission back in 2001 and 2002. Demands were made on the Taliban to hand over key al-Qaeda leaders, the Taliban refused, we went to war, and even though we succeeded in marginalizing the Taliban we didn’t succeed in achieving for ourselves what we’d been demanding the Taliban do. Having failed at that mission, we then shifted gears into a hazily defined effort to remake Afghanistan.despite obama's laudable insistence on having an exit strategy, he is still basically meandering along that hazy goal of remaking afghanistan, a project with no definable end point.
there probably wasn't a speech the president could give that would satisfy me. it looks like it may have satisfied some people. but the glow of the speech will quickly fade and we're still left with afghanistan. one thing i am reassured by is the fact that the 18 months runs out in mid-2011, just as the 2012 presidential election season will be getting started. i predict that the afghan war will still be unpopular then and that will give the president some incentive to follow through and remove forces. i just don't see how all the deaths in the meantime will be worth it.
