A case can be made that the best President this country has had, since Roosevelt, was Lyndon Johnson. It’s more than arguable that Kennedy did not have the political skills needed to get the Civil Rights bills through Congress, not to mention Medicare and a host of other initiatives. Johnson had all the tools to be a great domestic President, but he was undone by Vietnam. He was basically uninterested in foreign policy, but also basically uncertain, so he allowed himself to be led around by the best and the brightest, who led us and him into a morass. What a different history we would have had, if he had pulled out of Vietnam at the beginning of his first elected term. He could have done it, with a minimal erosion of political support. The inflation brought on by trying to fund a war and government programs might never have happened. We might never have had Richard Nixon. Ronald Reagan would have died as he should have, a doddering old actor. We would likely have gotten National Health Care in the late 60s. The list goes on.
There are no truly exact parallels in history. Obama is not Johnson. He has more self confidence on issues of foreign policy, for one. But during the campaign, whether out of expedience or actual conviction, he tied himself to an escalation of the war in Afghanistan, a war that could easily prove to be his Vietnam.
Afghanistan has a proud history of resisting foreign control. The people there would rather be under the heel of an Afghan than the thumb, however lightly pressed, of the foreigner. No one has ever been successful in dominating them and it’s unlikely that our culturally insensitive country will be any different. Add this to the history: our occupation was begun, and has been managed for seven years, by the most incompetent government this country has ever had. It’s a certainty that things will turn out bad when this is what we’ve created in the country so far:
Kept afloat by billions of dollars in American and other foreign aid, the government of Afghanistan is shot through with corruption and graft. From the lowliest traffic policeman to the family of President Hamid Karzai himself, the state built on the ruins of the Taliban government seven years ago now often seems to exist for little more than the enrichment of those who run it.
A raft of investigations has concluded that people at the highest levels of the Karzai administration, including President Karzai’s own brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, are cooperating in the country’s opium trade, now the world’s largest. In the streets and government offices, hardly a public transaction seems to unfold here that does not carry with it the requirement of a bribe, a gift, or, in case you are a beggar, “harchee” — whatever you have in your pocket.
The corruption, publicly acknowledged by President Karzai, is contributing to the collapse of public confidence in his government and to the resurgence of the Taliban, whose fighters have moved to the outskirts of Kabul, the capital.
The bribes amount to a tax on ordinary Afghans of extraordinary proportions. Taxes are not so bad if the money is invested in something that benefits the taxpayer, but this money is mostly flowing into foreign banks.
I will hazard the not at all risky prediction that we will never succeed in establishing a stable government in Afghanistan. It is as rife, if not more rife, with corruption than the Vietnam we tried to prop up in the 60s. It will become as much of a Big Muddy as Vietnam and will, in the end, be far worse than Iraq.
Obama would do himself a favor if he could come up with some artful way of getting out. There will never be a good time to do so, but the best time is while he’s riding a wave of popularity and people are more concerned with the failing economy. Four years from now, were he to leave now, he will be judged almost solely on the state of the economy. If he stays, the war in Afghanistan, which started out as damaged goods he got from Bush, will belong to him. Just like Vietnam belonged to Johnson.
