Obama’s Plan for Afghanistan

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Of all the absurd sound-bites about President Obama’s challenges and choices in Afghanistan, the most predictable — and the nuttiest — is this one:

“Obama doesn’t want to remembered as the president who lost Afghanistan.”

Simply by changing the first and last words (Obama and Afghanistan) this has been said about nearly every American leader since George Washington sent General “Mad” Anthony Wayne to defeat the Indian Nations of the Western Confederacy in 1794 — so that Washington wouldn’t be remembered as the president who lost Ohio.

What makes the claim so absurd in the present case is that it assumes that the United States has every really “had” Afghanistan. After all, you can’t lose something until you own it, right?

True, the US military deposed the Taliban in late 2001, but various warlords and tribal leaders continued to control their traditional territories, some by feigning cooperation with the US, some by simply ignoring the distant “conquerors.”

The last foreign power to conqueror and hold Afghanistan for more than a few years was the Mongol horde led by Genghis Khan in 1219. And he only accomplished that by slaughtering all inhabitants of some cities and driving the survivors back to an agrarian existence.

Obama is a smart guy. Unlike some previous occupants of the White House, our current president is known as a serious reader and a student of history. That’s why I was surprised in August while covering Obama’s speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars gathering in Phoenix, to hear him say, of Afghanistan:

This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people.

The president had not previously made such a definitive statement about his plans for the military in Afghanistan. I reported at the time what seemed obvious from Obama’s speech to the VFW: “We are pulling out of Iraq, but we may simultaneously deploy more troops to Afghanistan.”

In a televised speech tonight, President Obama will spell out the details of that deployment. He’ll give numbers (30,000 new troops by May) and goals (push back the resurgent Taliban and build up the Afghan military). And while he will almost certainly not give a definite timetable for an American withdrawal, he will reiterate his rather fungible statement about staying until the job done. What job, precisely? Other than in the broad outlines stated above, that is fungible, too.

President Obama has stated that he won’t make an “open-ended commitment” to Afghanistan. But it is hard to see how a commitment that lacks a time-table can avoid being “open-ended.”

Still, like many Americans, especially those families with members in uniform, I’ll be listening tonight and hoping to hear the president spell out a plan that recognizes and addresses the fundamental truth on the ground: that the United States can not control Afghanistan militarily, and indeed it never has.