President Obama: Nobel Peace Prize and Afghanistan
By Fubara David-West
President Obama was the pride of his nation and the world, as he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. His speech showed both his humility and his thoughtful approach to leadership, by refusing to ignore the controversy swirling around this particular award, which became even more pronounced, following his decision to introduce more troops into Afghanistan.
That decision will define the president's stewardship in the arena of national security, especially with regard to the multilateral uses of force on the international stage. The president's actions from this point on will be crucial. Meanwhile, he should find a way to de-emphasize this notion about the United States being at war on two fronts.
That will help steer him away from sounding increasingly like President George Bush, whose notions about the so-called global war on terror was unmistakeably repudiated, just a year ago. This will be difficult to do. Why? The president has to contend with the influence of the defense department, on matters such as this. He also has to be mindful of the fact that there are many in the Republican Party, who are looking for any movement away from their beloved president Bush's misguided "war," to highlight as evidence, that President Obama is weak on national security.
There is also the increasingly desperate President of Afghanistan, Mr. Karzai, who seems to recognize the potential problems that President Obama faces. That must be the explanation of the Afghan president's intimation, during the recent trip to Afghanistan by defense secretary Gates, that his country would need American and NATO forces for up to 30 years. The reaction of the United States to that, should be to the effect that in that case, Afghanistan has both the wrong man, and a supporting administrative cast in place.
Sometime during his second year in office, President Obama should become less enamored with the badge of war-time president, which his speech-writers continue to add in different guises into his speeches. Every military action is not a war. The campaign against Al Qaida and the Taliban is not a conventional war, even though some of its objectives cannot be met without the use of conventional forces. Furthermore, when actions such as the use of drones in Pakistani territory, and possible actions against elements of the Al Qaida network in places like Somalia are taken, we are not going to say that the United States is at war with either Somalia or Pakistan.
The fact that a significant element of the Afghan program involves training Afghans, to take over responsibilities for the security of their country, is also an important distinguishing element. The pressure being put on the Afghan government to fight corruption, as a way to make the government more of an efficient manager of the allocation of resources to its population is another.
Indeed, the more president and his national security team moves away from conceptualizing this military-political campaign as a conventional war, the easier it will become to focus on the essential elements of the campaign. That will make it more likely, that the anticipated draw-down of American military deployment in Afghanistan will become a reality. It will also make it possible to stick to a limited mission, for which the definition of success is ultimately possible.
I thank you.
Fubara David-West.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Obama on Afghanistan: Will the Public Tune him Out
Obama on Afghanistan: Will the Public Tune him Out?
When President Obama ends his address on a new strategy for the "war" in Afghanistan tonight, one group that will be beaming with pride will be those in the corner of the former Vice President Dick Cheney, who have been opining that the president is handling national security rather poorly.
Vice President Cheney, in particular should be a credible voice, if he now accuses the president of endangering the lives of American soldiers and the overall mission in Afghanistan. The argument will be that he has wasted too many valuable weeks, making up his mind on whether to accept his general's recommendation or not. General McChrystal reportedly asked for 40,000 troops. The president wants to send 34,000.
The argument that he has wasted time and endangered the troops will be given more credibility, by the fact that the president, after all of that time, holding his well-publicized meetings with his war council, has basically made a decision that he could have made weeks ago.
There is no credible way to dress up the message that President Obama needed all of those high-powered meetings, all of these weeks, just to shave off a few hundred soldiers from the number General McChrystal wanted. That is why the public will be quite justified, if it tunes the president out tonight.
This writer does not think that the difficulties, which the President Obama has put himself into will be overcome, with one of his great speeches. It will also be surprising if both his allies in the Democratic Party and Republicans, who in a few weeks will smell blood in the water, as this president staggers badly with this bad call on Afghanistan, do not recognize the writing on the wall.
The message will become ever more jarring, if members of the Congress start insisting upon a "war tax" to pay for this mission. Such a tax will push back the prospects for any quick recovery from the current recession. By the mid-term elections the unemployment rate might be 15 percent.
The latest word on the president's anticipated speech is that he will present a program to quickly have the troops in there, and ensure that this is not a long drawn-out program. That suggests that the president might also be seeing the writing on wall. If he does not decipher its every political code with some wisdom, his popularity will drop precipitously in a year, and with that much of the influence he might have in the Congress will disappear. A second presidential term might become an unrealistic goal.
I thank you.
Fubara David-West.
When President Obama ends his address on a new strategy for the "war" in Afghanistan tonight, one group that will be beaming with pride will be those in the corner of the former Vice President Dick Cheney, who have been opining that the president is handling national security rather poorly.
Vice President Cheney, in particular should be a credible voice, if he now accuses the president of endangering the lives of American soldiers and the overall mission in Afghanistan. The argument will be that he has wasted too many valuable weeks, making up his mind on whether to accept his general's recommendation or not. General McChrystal reportedly asked for 40,000 troops. The president wants to send 34,000.
The argument that he has wasted time and endangered the troops will be given more credibility, by the fact that the president, after all of that time, holding his well-publicized meetings with his war council, has basically made a decision that he could have made weeks ago.
There is no credible way to dress up the message that President Obama needed all of those high-powered meetings, all of these weeks, just to shave off a few hundred soldiers from the number General McChrystal wanted. That is why the public will be quite justified, if it tunes the president out tonight.
This writer does not think that the difficulties, which the President Obama has put himself into will be overcome, with one of his great speeches. It will also be surprising if both his allies in the Democratic Party and Republicans, who in a few weeks will smell blood in the water, as this president staggers badly with this bad call on Afghanistan, do not recognize the writing on the wall.
The message will become ever more jarring, if members of the Congress start insisting upon a "war tax" to pay for this mission. Such a tax will push back the prospects for any quick recovery from the current recession. By the mid-term elections the unemployment rate might be 15 percent.
The latest word on the president's anticipated speech is that he will present a program to quickly have the troops in there, and ensure that this is not a long drawn-out program. That suggests that the president might also be seeing the writing on wall. If he does not decipher its every political code with some wisdom, his popularity will drop precipitously in a year, and with that much of the influence he might have in the Congress will disappear. A second presidential term might become an unrealistic goal.
I thank you.
Fubara David-West.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Decision on Terrorists: A triumph Over Hysterical Legalisms
NaijaPolitics] Re: [ChatAfriK] Decision on Terrorists: A triumph Over Hysterical Legalisms
Saturday, November 14, 2009 12:05 PM
The decision by the Obama administration to try these terrorism suspects in the Federal Court in New York is a great triumph of a fidelity to American values: a movement towards the values of constitutionalism and rights as inalienable quantities, over the hysterical legalisms of the Bush administration and others who easily bought into those.
The Bush administration seems to have moved in the direction it did, in order to skirt the normal processes of law, with a full belief that the horror of the 9/11 attacks, justified whatever lengths the administration went to punish both those who were responsible for the attacks and their accomplices. Thus, people accused of a terrible crime could be detained indefinitely without trial, in violation of the constitution of the United States. They could also be tortured, in violation of international conventions, for what the former Vice President Cheney has called valuable intelligence.
That move betrayed a lack of confidence in the American judicial system. A result of all of that is the decision to try the terrorists in military tribunals for "war crimes." In fact, the terrorist acts were not committed by belligerent forces against civilian targets during a war. Moving in the direction set by the Bush administration, would have left the world with a precedent that encouraged all sorts of governments and regimes around the world, to try foreigners accused of terrible crimes in extra-judicial settings.
I thank you.
Fubara David-West.
9/11 Trial Poses Unparalleled Legal Obstacles for Both Sides
Twitter
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and BENJAMIN WEISER
Published: November 13, 2009
WASHINGTON — How do you defend one of the most notorious terrorist figures in history?
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
Associated Press
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, accused of being the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, after his capture in 2003.
The Best Way to Try Terrorists
Is federal court the right place to prosecute the 9/11 defendants? Join the Discussion »
Related
Accused 9/11 Mastermind to Face Civilian Trial in N.Y. (November 14, 2009)
Trial Venue Leaves 9/11 Families Angry or Satisfied (November 14, 2009)
How New York May Tighten Security Vise (November 14, 2009)
Times Topics: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed Sept. 11, 2001
One step, legal analysts say, may be to ask for a change of venue.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s lawyers, whoever they are, will no doubt question whether he can get a fair trial from a jury sitting, as Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. noted, in a Manhattan courthouse “just blocks away from where the Twin Towers once stood.�
Then will come the inevitable challenges to interrogation methods used on Mr. Mohammed during more than six years in detention. The government has acknowledged waterboarding him 183 times to extract information about the Sept. 11 attacks, which he eventually admitted planning.
Finally, if Mr. Mohammed is convicted, defense lawyers will most likely plead for jurors in New York, historically more cautious about capital punishment than much of the rest of country, to spare the sentence of execution and send him to prison for the rest of his life instead.
The Obama administration’s decision to try Mr. Mohammed and four other terrorism suspects in a civilian court provoked sharp debate among politicians and lawyers about whether American courtrooms are the proper place for so-called enemy combatants, whose suspected crimes were hatched overseas and who viewed themselves as participants in a war against the United States. Both sides agreed that defense lawyers and prosecutors would face unique problems in what is likely to be a hugely complex and emotion-laden case.
Whatever the case, if it actually makes its way before a jury, it promises to be a trial like no other in memory, an extraordinary clash involving the morality of torture, due process rights of foreign terrorist operatives, and the ability of civilian courts to handle national security cases.
Mr. Mohammed and his four co-defendants in military custody have admitted their active involvement in plotting the Sept. 11 attacks and have boasted of their success in killing 3,000 people.
Once the Justice Department brings formal terrorism charges against him, Mr. Mohammed could seek to enter a guilty plea, just as he has tried to do in military custody.
But legal analysts were not convinced that he would go that route and said that he might instead seek to martyr himself in the eyes of Muslim extremists through a grand and lengthy trial.
“There’s reason to believe he will try to take advantage of a public platform — more public than Guantánamo afforded him — to publicize his jihadist views,� said David H. Laufman, a Washington lawyer and former federal terrorism prosecutor.
In fact, one question will be how a judge will prevent a trial from turning into a forum on the American war on terrorism, including the Bush administration’s interrogation policies. Terrorism defendants in lesser-known trials have given rambling speeches condemning the government.
The government may also want to avoid having its own interrogation tactics put on trial. To lessen the impact of the coercive measures used against the men, the F.B.I. has used “clean teams� of investigators to collect information independently and do reviews that it says have not been tainted by rough interrogation techniques. Still, any defense lawyer will try to present evidence, including photographs and the testimony of interrogators, to show Mr. Mohammed and his co-defendants were mistreated.
Prosecutors will counter that Mr. Mohammed’s statements in the last few years should be admissible at trial because they were voluntary and came long after the government stopped waterboarding him in 2003.
But Steven Wax, a federal public defender in Oregon who has represented seven Guantánamo defendants, said that “if I’m the defense attorney, I would say ‘this was the product of torture’ � and should be thrown out of court.
If the Justice Department does try to introduce evidence that the defense lawyers argue was coerced by torture, “I think that we’re going to shine a light on something that a lot of people don’t want to look at,� said Denny LeBoeuf, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who led the group’s efforts in Guantánamo capital cases.
Mr. Holder did not comment directly Friday on the torture accusations but said he was “quite confident� that the Justice Department could produce enough evidence, including some not yet revealed publicly, to get convictions. Indeed, legal analysts said the Justice Department appeared to have a strong case based on Mr. Mohammed’s recent statements at Guantánamo as well as e-mail and Internet communications involving the accused plotters.
Mr. Holder said that if the men were convicted, “ultimately they must face the ultimate justice�—meaning the death penalty.
But one challenge in seeking the “ultimate justice� is New York’s jury pool, which is generally perceived by prosecutors and defense lawyers to be more liberal than other places.
For example, a Manhattan federal jury twice deadlocked in 2001, resulting in life sentences for two Qaeda operatives who confessed to helping bomb the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, attacks that killed more than 200 people.
It was in part because of the concern about New York juries that the Justice Department brought its prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui in Alexandria, Va., where jurors were believed to be more likely to vote for the death penalty, according to law enforcement officials. But Mr. Moussaoui also received a life sentence.
Indeed, the last executions in federal cases in Manhattan occurred in the 1950s, most notably the case of the Rosenbergs.
If the Sept. 11 defendants do face death penalty proceedings, their lawyers will almost certainly cite as a mitigating argument against capital punishment their clients’ treatment in detention, including the claims of coercive interrogation and in the case of Mr. Mohammed, the 183 instances of waterboarding.
“I think that’s certainly on everybody’s radar screen,� said David A. Ruhnke, a civilian lawyer who represented one of the five Sept. 11 detainees, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, before the military commissions, and a separate capital defendant in the embassy bombings trial.
“The fact that defendants have already been subjected to cruel and likely illegal punishment,� Mr. Ruhnke said, “becomes a powerful argument against inflicting the ultimate punishment.�
While the defense may consider a motion to move the trial out of New York because it was the epicenter of the attacks, some legal analysts said that might be difficult to do. Such requests have been approved — in the Oklahoma City bombing, Timothy McVeigh’s trial was moved to Denver — but they are rare and prosecutors are likely to argue that the entire country was gravely affected by the Sept. 11 attacks.
Sign in to RecommendNext Article in US (2 of 32) » A version of this article appeared in print on November 14, 2009, on page A13 of the New York edition.
__._,_.___
Saturday, November 14, 2009 12:05 PM
The decision by the Obama administration to try these terrorism suspects in the Federal Court in New York is a great triumph of a fidelity to American values: a movement towards the values of constitutionalism and rights as inalienable quantities, over the hysterical legalisms of the Bush administration and others who easily bought into those.
The Bush administration seems to have moved in the direction it did, in order to skirt the normal processes of law, with a full belief that the horror of the 9/11 attacks, justified whatever lengths the administration went to punish both those who were responsible for the attacks and their accomplices. Thus, people accused of a terrible crime could be detained indefinitely without trial, in violation of the constitution of the United States. They could also be tortured, in violation of international conventions, for what the former Vice President Cheney has called valuable intelligence.
That move betrayed a lack of confidence in the American judicial system. A result of all of that is the decision to try the terrorists in military tribunals for "war crimes." In fact, the terrorist acts were not committed by belligerent forces against civilian targets during a war. Moving in the direction set by the Bush administration, would have left the world with a precedent that encouraged all sorts of governments and regimes around the world, to try foreigners accused of terrible crimes in extra-judicial settings.
I thank you.
Fubara David-West.
9/11 Trial Poses Unparalleled Legal Obstacles for Both Sides
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and BENJAMIN WEISER
Published: November 13, 2009
WASHINGTON — How do you defend one of the most notorious terrorist figures in history?
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
Associated Press
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, accused of being the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, after his capture in 2003.
The Best Way to Try Terrorists
Is federal court the right place to prosecute the 9/11 defendants? Join the Discussion »
Related
Accused 9/11 Mastermind to Face Civilian Trial in N.Y. (November 14, 2009)
Trial Venue Leaves 9/11 Families Angry or Satisfied (November 14, 2009)
How New York May Tighten Security Vise (November 14, 2009)
Times Topics: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed Sept. 11, 2001
One step, legal analysts say, may be to ask for a change of venue.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s lawyers, whoever they are, will no doubt question whether he can get a fair trial from a jury sitting, as Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. noted, in a Manhattan courthouse “just blocks away from where the Twin Towers once stood.�
Then will come the inevitable challenges to interrogation methods used on Mr. Mohammed during more than six years in detention. The government has acknowledged waterboarding him 183 times to extract information about the Sept. 11 attacks, which he eventually admitted planning.
Finally, if Mr. Mohammed is convicted, defense lawyers will most likely plead for jurors in New York, historically more cautious about capital punishment than much of the rest of country, to spare the sentence of execution and send him to prison for the rest of his life instead.
The Obama administration’s decision to try Mr. Mohammed and four other terrorism suspects in a civilian court provoked sharp debate among politicians and lawyers about whether American courtrooms are the proper place for so-called enemy combatants, whose suspected crimes were hatched overseas and who viewed themselves as participants in a war against the United States. Both sides agreed that defense lawyers and prosecutors would face unique problems in what is likely to be a hugely complex and emotion-laden case.
Whatever the case, if it actually makes its way before a jury, it promises to be a trial like no other in memory, an extraordinary clash involving the morality of torture, due process rights of foreign terrorist operatives, and the ability of civilian courts to handle national security cases.
Mr. Mohammed and his four co-defendants in military custody have admitted their active involvement in plotting the Sept. 11 attacks and have boasted of their success in killing 3,000 people.
Once the Justice Department brings formal terrorism charges against him, Mr. Mohammed could seek to enter a guilty plea, just as he has tried to do in military custody.
But legal analysts were not convinced that he would go that route and said that he might instead seek to martyr himself in the eyes of Muslim extremists through a grand and lengthy trial.
“There’s reason to believe he will try to take advantage of a public platform — more public than Guantánamo afforded him — to publicize his jihadist views,� said David H. Laufman, a Washington lawyer and former federal terrorism prosecutor.
In fact, one question will be how a judge will prevent a trial from turning into a forum on the American war on terrorism, including the Bush administration’s interrogation policies. Terrorism defendants in lesser-known trials have given rambling speeches condemning the government.
The government may also want to avoid having its own interrogation tactics put on trial. To lessen the impact of the coercive measures used against the men, the F.B.I. has used “clean teams� of investigators to collect information independently and do reviews that it says have not been tainted by rough interrogation techniques. Still, any defense lawyer will try to present evidence, including photographs and the testimony of interrogators, to show Mr. Mohammed and his co-defendants were mistreated.
Prosecutors will counter that Mr. Mohammed’s statements in the last few years should be admissible at trial because they were voluntary and came long after the government stopped waterboarding him in 2003.
But Steven Wax, a federal public defender in Oregon who has represented seven Guantánamo defendants, said that “if I’m the defense attorney, I would say ‘this was the product of torture’ � and should be thrown out of court.
If the Justice Department does try to introduce evidence that the defense lawyers argue was coerced by torture, “I think that we’re going to shine a light on something that a lot of people don’t want to look at,� said Denny LeBoeuf, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who led the group’s efforts in Guantánamo capital cases.
Mr. Holder did not comment directly Friday on the torture accusations but said he was “quite confident� that the Justice Department could produce enough evidence, including some not yet revealed publicly, to get convictions. Indeed, legal analysts said the Justice Department appeared to have a strong case based on Mr. Mohammed’s recent statements at Guantánamo as well as e-mail and Internet communications involving the accused plotters.
Mr. Holder said that if the men were convicted, “ultimately they must face the ultimate justice�—meaning the death penalty.
But one challenge in seeking the “ultimate justice� is New York’s jury pool, which is generally perceived by prosecutors and defense lawyers to be more liberal than other places.
For example, a Manhattan federal jury twice deadlocked in 2001, resulting in life sentences for two Qaeda operatives who confessed to helping bomb the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, attacks that killed more than 200 people.
It was in part because of the concern about New York juries that the Justice Department brought its prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui in Alexandria, Va., where jurors were believed to be more likely to vote for the death penalty, according to law enforcement officials. But Mr. Moussaoui also received a life sentence.
Indeed, the last executions in federal cases in Manhattan occurred in the 1950s, most notably the case of the Rosenbergs.
If the Sept. 11 defendants do face death penalty proceedings, their lawyers will almost certainly cite as a mitigating argument against capital punishment their clients’ treatment in detention, including the claims of coercive interrogation and in the case of Mr. Mohammed, the 183 instances of waterboarding.
“I think that’s certainly on everybody’s radar screen,� said David A. Ruhnke, a civilian lawyer who represented one of the five Sept. 11 detainees, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, before the military commissions, and a separate capital defendant in the embassy bombings trial.
“The fact that defendants have already been subjected to cruel and likely illegal punishment,� Mr. Ruhnke said, “becomes a powerful argument against inflicting the ultimate punishment.�
While the defense may consider a motion to move the trial out of New York because it was the epicenter of the attacks, some legal analysts said that might be difficult to do. Such requests have been approved — in the Oklahoma City bombing, Timothy McVeigh’s trial was moved to Denver — but they are rare and prosecutors are likely to argue that the entire country was gravely affected by the Sept. 11 attacks.
Sign in to RecommendNext Article in US (2 of 32) » A version of this article appeared in print on November 14, 2009, on page A13 of the New York edition.
__._,_.___
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Pakistani Anti-Taliban War: A US Opportunity
Pakistani Anti-Taliban War: US Should Supply Pakistan Smart Weapons
The ongoing military action against the Taliban that Pakistan has launched gives the United States a unique opportunity, to wage an effective surrogate war in the region and thus to offer an obvious answer to the question as to whether the United States should send additional troops into Afghanistan.
The answer is that the United States should not. It should instead, fully supply Pakistan with smart weapons and other military hardware, with which to crush the Taliban and Al Qaida, both inside Pakistan and within the border region with Afghanistan. The United States should also fund the recruitment of Pakistani and Afghan citizens into the fight. That is the best way to give Pakistanis and Afghans ownership of the battle, and to make way for a politically and militarily self-sustaining Afghanistan, when the United States withdraws its forces.
I thank you.
Fubara David-West.
The ongoing military action against the Taliban that Pakistan has launched gives the United States a unique opportunity, to wage an effective surrogate war in the region and thus to offer an obvious answer to the question as to whether the United States should send additional troops into Afghanistan.
The answer is that the United States should not. It should instead, fully supply Pakistan with smart weapons and other military hardware, with which to crush the Taliban and Al Qaida, both inside Pakistan and within the border region with Afghanistan. The United States should also fund the recruitment of Pakistani and Afghan citizens into the fight. That is the best way to give Pakistanis and Afghans ownership of the battle, and to make way for a politically and militarily self-sustaining Afghanistan, when the United States withdraws its forces.
I thank you.
Fubara David-West.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Obama Deserves the Nobel Peace Prizev
Congratulations to President Obama for his Nobel Peace prize. Yes: there is a point to be made about whether the award reflects his life's work or not. However, such evaluations cannot come close to approximating mathematical exactitude, especially considering the fact that a singular event in the life of nations and peoples can change the course of history.
President Obama's election promises to be one of those events. His declared commitment to steer the most powerful country in the world towards its foundational ideals, in national and international politics, and the concrete steps he has taken since becoming president in January, thoughtfully to move the world away from the abyss of a new Cold War, should be enough to make him as worthy as anyone else of the Nobel Peace Prize.
I thank you.
Fubara David-West.
News Analysis
President Obama's election promises to be one of those events. His declared commitment to steer the most powerful country in the world towards its foundational ideals, in national and international politics, and the concrete steps he has taken since becoming president in January, thoughtfully to move the world away from the abyss of a new Cold War, should be enough to make him as worthy as anyone else of the Nobel Peace Prize.
I thank you.
Fubara David-West.
News Analysis
For Presidency in Search of Success, Nobel Adds a Twist
WASHINGTON — President Obama is given to big events at big moments, replete with stirring speeches, lofty backdrops and stadium-size crowds.
Skip to next paragraph
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Obama's Waterloo
NaijaPolitics] Obama's Waterloo
Monday, August 31, 2009 3:49 PM
From:
Fubara David-West
President Obama's Waterloo at this remove is not health care reform, but Afghanistan. It seems that the president learned nothing from President Bush's experience in Iraq, and reflected very little on the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, before putting his revamped Bush policy on Afghanistan in place.
If the Soviet Union could not reshape Afghanistan for its purposes, with a full-scale occupation of the country, what gives president Obama the idea that somehow, a few thousand American soldiers, not backed up by a United States that really wants to have a permanent presence in Afghanistan will succeed, where the Soviets failed? Hopefully, the president and his advisers are not fooling themselves with notions of American exceptionalism.
The American voter did not vote for any of the things President Obama is doing in Afghanistan. Sure: he could say that he told the public that he would remove American forces from Iraq and beef up military operations in Afghanistan. However, the public listened to him with the assumption that he had good sense, and that his presidency would move away from the fiascoes of the Bush presidency.
At this point, the president is failing to measure up to those expectations. He seems to be an unwitting captive of two groups: the holdovers of the Bush administration that he has kept around, and the Right Wing militarists in the United States, whose allure for President Bush led that president to all of the defense and foreign policy disasters of his administration.
If the American people were told that what President Obama's ideas on Afghanistan amounted to was an unimaginative reprise of President Bush's war policy in Iraq, which was buttressed by the conceptually vacuous War on Terror, he would never have been elected president. If he does not make a bold move away from his current tactics in Afghanistan, his popularity will fall off dramatically over the next two years, and guarantee that he will be a one-term president.
Even worse than that is the possibility that Democrats in the House and the Senate will start abandoning him in droves in a year or so, as they see an impending disaster in the mid-term elections. Even a successful legislative record with healthcare reform will not save the day, if in two years, the American tax payer is still spending hundreds of millions of dollars in Afghanistan and losing a few American soldiers every week.
The president should urgently change course in Afghanistan. The mission should be aimed at nothing more than destroying Al Qaida and aspects of the Taliban, which are viscerally antagonistic to the United states and its allies. Such a mission does not require thousand of troops in Afghanistan. It requires both an expanded use of smart military hardware to destroy the training facilities, weapons depots, command and control facilities, and safe houses that both Al Qaida and the Taliban use for their operations, and a virile ground operation with special forces and Intelligence units, which are both nimble and effective.
Yes: there should be a political component of the effort, but it should be linked to the strategic mission in ways that make tactical moves easy to evaluate quickly. That is the way the administration might begin to move away, from the increasingly unsustainable idea that Afghanistan is a quasi-protectorate of the United States.
With a wise revaluation of the policy on Afghanistan, the United States should be able to start withdrawing significant numbers of military personnel from that country in two years, which will assure the voters that they did not make a big mistake last November.
I thank you.
Fubara David-west.
Monday, August 31, 2009 3:49 PM
From:
Fubara David-West
President Obama's Waterloo at this remove is not health care reform, but Afghanistan. It seems that the president learned nothing from President Bush's experience in Iraq, and reflected very little on the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, before putting his revamped Bush policy on Afghanistan in place.
If the Soviet Union could not reshape Afghanistan for its purposes, with a full-scale occupation of the country, what gives president Obama the idea that somehow, a few thousand American soldiers, not backed up by a United States that really wants to have a permanent presence in Afghanistan will succeed, where the Soviets failed? Hopefully, the president and his advisers are not fooling themselves with notions of American exceptionalism.
The American voter did not vote for any of the things President Obama is doing in Afghanistan. Sure: he could say that he told the public that he would remove American forces from Iraq and beef up military operations in Afghanistan. However, the public listened to him with the assumption that he had good sense, and that his presidency would move away from the fiascoes of the Bush presidency.
At this point, the president is failing to measure up to those expectations. He seems to be an unwitting captive of two groups: the holdovers of the Bush administration that he has kept around, and the Right Wing militarists in the United States, whose allure for President Bush led that president to all of the defense and foreign policy disasters of his administration.
If the American people were told that what President Obama's ideas on Afghanistan amounted to was an unimaginative reprise of President Bush's war policy in Iraq, which was buttressed by the conceptually vacuous War on Terror, he would never have been elected president. If he does not make a bold move away from his current tactics in Afghanistan, his popularity will fall off dramatically over the next two years, and guarantee that he will be a one-term president.
Even worse than that is the possibility that Democrats in the House and the Senate will start abandoning him in droves in a year or so, as they see an impending disaster in the mid-term elections. Even a successful legislative record with healthcare reform will not save the day, if in two years, the American tax payer is still spending hundreds of millions of dollars in Afghanistan and losing a few American soldiers every week.
The president should urgently change course in Afghanistan. The mission should be aimed at nothing more than destroying Al Qaida and aspects of the Taliban, which are viscerally antagonistic to the United states and its allies. Such a mission does not require thousand of troops in Afghanistan. It requires both an expanded use of smart military hardware to destroy the training facilities, weapons depots, command and control facilities, and safe houses that both Al Qaida and the Taliban use for their operations, and a virile ground operation with special forces and Intelligence units, which are both nimble and effective.
Yes: there should be a political component of the effort, but it should be linked to the strategic mission in ways that make tactical moves easy to evaluate quickly. That is the way the administration might begin to move away, from the increasingly unsustainable idea that Afghanistan is a quasi-protectorate of the United States.
With a wise revaluation of the policy on Afghanistan, the United States should be able to start withdrawing significant numbers of military personnel from that country in two years, which will assure the voters that they did not make a big mistake last November.
I thank you.
Fubara David-west.
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