Obama on Afghanistan

President Obama has so far had to spend the greater part of his first ten months in office cleaning up the Stygian mess left him by George W. Bush. His speech last night on Afghanistan certainly falls into that category. As a candidate Barack Obama said Iraq was the wrong war. He said he would wind down there and ramp up in Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda had been based and where its Taliban enablers had ruled and were once again regaining strength. There is some semblance of sense to this. Iraq was indeed a colossal blunder, and there was reason to pursue Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Once becoming President, Obama augmented the 30,000 troops he inherited from Bush with another 30,000. Now, after after long study and consideration, he has settled on sending another 30,000 and plans to keep them there until beginning to draw down in July, 2011. It's an Obama Afghan "surge," if you will, designed to pacify the countryside and allow time to train up competent Afghan security forces to take over the work themselves. Will it work? Well, that depends on what you mean by "work."

There is no doubt another 30,000 American soldiers will tamp down violence around the country. There will be increased casualties as they enter hostile ares to establish a presence. If they stay and hold for awhile, the losses will then decline. That was the pattern in Iraq, and in areas in Afghanistan where the increased personnel has already been committed.

But the real problem will be to establish anything lasting. The Taliban is indigenous and we are transient foreigners. Tribal leaders will determine the long term situation, not the United States. The only way to change that would be to keep a lot of troops there for ten to twenty years and to spend a couple of hundred billion dollars in aid. Obama realizes that is something the American people will not stand for. Nor should they.

Pakistan will determine the regional fate of Al Qaeda, not us. Al Qaeda is no longer in Afghanistan, anyway. Intelligence testimony is that there are no more than 100 al Qaeda in Afghanistan. They are across the border in Pakistan. The President paid attention to that in the speech, saying repeatedly that the security of "Afghanistan and Pakistan" is a vital interest of the United States. The limitation, of course, is that Pakistan is a sovereign country that does not want an American army on its territory. For its success, therefore, the goal of eliminating Al Qaeda in Pakistan's western tribal regions depends on the Pakistani Army being the hammer while the U.S. presence across the border in Afghanistan is the anvil. That places great reliance on an army and a government that have proved much less than dedicated to actively prosecuting any such sustained effort.

In this light it is little wonder Obama took such a long time to come to a decision on strategy. He has no good options. He has seemingly settled on the political expediency of not leaving too early to anger the hawks while trying not to stay too long to anger the doves. With a year and a half to play with, who knows, maybe he could even get really lucky and have a Predator strike nail Osama bin Laden. In the meantime, he will hope that a period of relative quiet in Afghanistan will be accompanied by enough progress in Pakistan to claim success and get the whole miasma behind him in time for the 2012 election. That's about what it comes down to.