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.