Obama’s Afghanistan Plan: Falling Into the Macho Escalation No-Win Trap

The speech has not yet been given, but everyone knows that President Obama plans to escalate the presence of American troops in Afghanistan. All that time spent deliberating and the so-called solution fulfills the deepest, most heart-felt wishes of conservative military hawks. Death and destruction will ensue. American tax payers will pay the bills, at the cost of countless domestic programs that would strengthen our country’s social and economic well-being. American troops will shed more of their own and Afghan blood. All of this will certainly boost the coffers of the military industry and military-support contractors. And after who knows how many more years of war, Afghanistan will still not magically become transformed into a fairy-tale, Western-styled democracy or whatever the goal of this war is supposed to be.

Is this really worth the cost of not supplying fuel for Republicans to have another excuse to screech about the supposed weakness of another Democratic president? Now they can really concentrate on destroying health care reform. And once again hopes are dashed that a U.S. President would do the right thing, instead of doing the thing that he and his advisers think would least affect his chances of re-election. After all, that’s what is really important.

Of what I read so far about this, Bob Herbert’s Op-Ed “A Tragic Mistake” most eloquently outlines the  problems of this decision. Herbert writes,

[…] I suppose we’ll never learn. President Obama will go on TV Tuesday night to announce that he plans to send tens of thousands of additional American troops to Afghanistan to fight in a war that has lasted most of the decade and has long since failed. After going through an extended period of highly ritualized consultations and deliberations, the president has arrived at a decision that never was much in doubt, and that will prove to be a tragic mistake. It was also, for the president, the easier option.

It would have been much more difficult for Mr. Obama to look this troubled nation in the eye and explain why it is in our best interest to begin winding down the permanent state of warfare left to us by the Bush and Cheney regime. It would have taken real courage for the commander in chief to stop feeding our young troops into the relentless meat grinder of Afghanistan, to face up to the terrible toll the war is taking — on the troops themselves and in very insidious ways on the nation as a whole.

More soldiers committed suicide this year than in any year for which we have complete records. But the military is now able to meet its recruitment goals because the young men and women who are signing up can’t find jobs in civilian life. The United States is broken — school systems are deteriorating, the economy is in shambles, homelessness and poverty rates are expanding — yet we’re nation-building in Afghanistan, sending economically distressed young people over there by the tens of thousands at an annual cost of a million dollars each.

I keep hearing that Americans are concerned about gargantuan budget deficits. Well, the idea that you can control mounting deficits while engaged in two wars that you refuse to raise taxes to pay for is a patent absurdity. Small children might believe something along those lines. Rational adults should not. […]

The word is that Mr. Obama will tell the public Tuesday that he is sending another 30,000 or so troops to Afghanistan. And while it is reported that he has some strategy in mind for eventually turning the fight over to the ragtag and less-than-energetic Afghan military, it’s clear that U.S. forces will be engaged for years to come, perhaps many years.

The tougher choice for the president would have been to tell the public that the U.S. is a nation faced with terrible troubles here at home and that it is time to begin winding down a war that veered wildly off track years ago. But that would have taken great political courage. It would have left Mr. Obama vulnerable to the charge of being weak, of cutting and running, of betraying the troops who have already served. The Republicans would have a field day with that scenario.

Lyndon Johnson is heard on the tapes telling Senator Richard Russell, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, about a comment made by a Texas rancher in the days leading up to the buildup in Vietnam. The rancher had told Johnson that the public would forgive the president “for everything except being weak.” Russell said: “Well, there’s a lot in that. There’s a whole lot in that.”

We still haven’t learned to recognize real strength, which is why it so often seems that the easier choice for a president is to keep the troops marching off to war.