Obama, against all odds, appears to be winning (at least for the moment) the debate about Iraq. This is mainly because al-Maliki is no fool, and like the rest of the world, he is not interested in another four years of George Bush, brought to you by an increasingly befuddled McCain.
But we here have to hope that once firmly ensconced in the White House, Obama will re-think the other half of his Iraq policy: his commitment to throw additional troops into the quagmire that is Afghanistan. This may be smart politics in the short run, but all this may come back to haunt him in the White House. Juan Cole makes the case for withdrawal in clear concise prose.
We who admire him don’t want Afghanistan to become an albatross around the neck of a President Obama. I am old enough to remember one of the things that nearly killed the Democratic Party as a presidential party in the US, which was the way Lyndon Johnson let himself gradually get roped into ramping up the US troop presence in Vietnam from a small force to 500,000, and then still not win.
Afghan tribes are fractious. They feud. Their territory is vast and rugged, and they know it like the back of their hands. Afghans are Jeffersonians in the sense that they want a light touch from the central government, and heavy handedness drives them into rebellion. Stand up Karzai’s army and air force and give him some billions to bribe the tribal chiefs, and let him apply carrot and stick himself. We need to get out of there. “Al-Qaeda” was always Bin Laden’s hype. He wanted to get us on the ground there so that the Mujahideen could bleed us the way they did the Soviets. It is a trap.
Beware.
It may have been possible to “win” that war, but we screwed up there as we did everywhere else the past seven years, and it’s doubtful we can recover. Osama’s not there anymore, we don’t understand the culture, and Afghanistan has historically been a graveyard for would be imperialists. The British were culturally sensitive by comparison to us, and they got their asses handed to them in Afghanistan. Same with the Russians. We can’t keep bombing wedding parties and expect to win hearts and minds.
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