ANALYSIS:Critics wonder why, if Obama views the Afghan war as so critical, he has set a withdrawal date, writes LARA MARLOWE
THE AMERICAN people were the most important of many audiences US president Barack Obama addressed in his speech at West Point on Tuesday night and opinion polls show that roughly half believe his central argument: that if the Taliban and al-Qaeda are not “disrupted, dismantled and defeated” in Afghanistan, the US mainland is in danger of attack.
Republicans support the war but are sceptical of Obama. Democrats support Obama but are sceptical of the war. When Obama invited leading US newspaper columnists to the White House for lunch before his speech he told them: “I am painfully clear that this is politically unpopular. Not only is this not popular, but it’s least popular in my own party. But that’s not how I make decisions.”
The most virulent criticism of his decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan comes from the pacifist left. In an open letter at the beginning of the week, the liberal film-maker Michael Moore warned the president the Afghan “surge” would “destroy the hopes and dreams so many millions have placed in you”.
Yet Obama has been consistent in his determination to “finish the job” in what he calls “the necessary war”. As early as August 2007, he promised to send at least two additional brigades to Afghanistan. By next summer, he will have doubled troop levels there, to more than 100,000.
Now critics accuse him of selling out to the Pentagon. “With just one speech . . . you will turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics,” Moore predicted. “You will teach them what they’ve always heard is true – that all politicians are alike.”
On the right, criticism centres on the biggest surprise of his speech: the setting of a target date, July 2011, to begin drawing down troops in Afghanistan. Senator John McCain, his opponent in last year’s presidential race, said the withdrawal date “only emboldens al-Qaeda and the Taliban, while dispiriting our Afghan partners and making it less likely that they will risk their lives to take our side in this fight”.
The July 2011 target date may be a pious wish, a rhetorical sop to the war-weary public and Democrats opposed to the escalation. After all, the Obama administration let deadlines slide on closing Guantánamo, on healthcare and on climate change legislation. Hours before his speech, a senior administration official stressed in a background briefing that the president would not “specify the end of that transition process, nor will he specify the pace at which it will proceed. These variables – pace and end – will be dictated by conditions on the ground.”
The West Point speech again demonstrated the president’s clear, logical, almost mathematical thought processes. Briefly summarised, the Afghan strategy he elaborated is as follows: inject a short, sharp burst of 30,000 more US troops, and – if you can get them, 5,000 Nato allies – into Afghanistan to break the momentum of the Taliban. (Reinforcements will be concentrated in the southern and eastern provinces where the Taliban is strongest.) At the same time, accelerate training of Afghan security forces, having put President Hamid Karzai on notice that 18 months from now, you’ll start moving out.
But there’s a contradiction at the heart of Obama’s elegant reasoning. As Andrew Bacevich of Boston University wrote in the Washington Post newspaper: “If Afghanistan is so critical to the wellbeing of the American people, then why set limits on US involvement there? If saving Afghanistan is essential to our safety and security – a preposterous notion – then why not send 100,000 troops rather than 30,000? Why not vow to do ‘whatever it takes’, rather than signal an early exit?”
Without naming George Bush’s administration, Obama blamed his predecessor several times for invading Iraq and dropping the ball in Afghanistan. Obama’s Afghan surge gives the impression he is protecting himself against future criticism. Whatever happens in Afghanistan, he’ll be able to say: “I did what the generals asked. I gave it our best try. If it failed, it’s the fault of the Afghans, the Pakistanis, the allies, whoever . . .”
Obama’s argument probably sounds good in the White House situation room and at West Point. But will it stand up to the messy realities of the Afghan war? The strategy is founded on variables the US does not control: the ability of Afghan security forces to assume responsibility; the possibility of forging a less corrupt, semi-competent Afghan government; greater willingness on the part of the divided Pakistani government to take on the Taliban and al-Qaeda in their country.
At present, attrition in the Afghan forces is higher than recruitment. US-trained recruits have repeatedly attacked western forces. The New York Times newspaper reported that “the Afghan army and police have shown themselves unable to maintain themselves in the field, to purge their ranks of corruption, to mount operations at night or to operate any weapon more complicated than a rifle”.
Obama seems to acknowledge that the deeply flawed Afghan government is probably the best that can be hoped for: “Although it was marred by fraud [the presidential election in August] produced a government that is consistent with Afghanistan’s laws and constitution,” he said.
Nuclear-armed Pakistan poses an equally intractable problem. “We cannot tolerate a safe haven for terrorists whose location is known, and whose intentions are clear,” Obama said, alluding to the alleged presence of al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. The US is not allowed to deploy troops in Pakistan, but an important part of the new strategy, not mentioned in the West Point speech, is to step up CIA operations in Pakistan.
Finally, Obama faces stiff opposition from his own camp, who object to spending scarce resources on guns instead of butter. The projected cost of the Afghan operation over the next decade would pay for US healthcare reform.
The president said he cannot commit to an open-ended presence in Afghanistan “because the nation that I am most interested in building is our own”.
Lara Marlowe is Washington Correspondent