The Obama legacy hinges on next week.

6 thoughts on “The Obama legacy hinges on next week.”

1. Bill Moyers the other week had a collection of audio recordings of LBJ, circa 1965 or so, consulting with his old friends in the Senate about what to do in Vietnam. Over and over, Johnson laid out the choices: pull out of Vietnam, in which case the dominoes would fall as far as India and Indonesia; or commit combat troops, which meant a prolonged “land war in Asia against the Chinese.” He clearly saw Vietnam as a dilemma.

   BUT: Never did he challenge either of these two underlying assumptions: dominoes will fall or a land war with China. The way he phrased his questions determined the answer. Neither assumption was correct, but he never challenged either one.

   I mention this in the context of Afghanistan: what are the underlying assumptions? That if we pull out, this will adversely affect Pakistan? That a victory for the Afghan Taliban means a nuclear armed Al Qaeda? That pulling out, job not done, will damage our prestige, and the persuasive power of the threat to invade some other place?

   I question all those assumptions and I don’t really understand why Afghanistan will be the key issue in 2010, OR what our key national interest is there. I see the downsides, but no obvious upside since there’s no way that I can foresee a substantial improvement within 12 months from now–or 24, 26, or 48 months.

   The most interesting bit of Obama’s address from West Point, for me, will be his statement of our strategic purpose. If he says it’s nation building in Afghanistan–help them until they can stand on their own–then I’ll despair entirely, not just for the future of Afghanistan but also for the future of the Obama administration and the U.S.

   The era of “America to the rescue” ended almost 20 years ago. We desperately need nation building at home, not in Afghanistan, where no level of troops is going to change the outcome.

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   1. .
      
      but I think its true nevertheless, that the entire effort of progressives across the board will be judged by the electorate in 2010 based on 2 things:
      
      *** am I confident enough in my financial future to buy a big tub of popcorn when I go out to a movie; and
      
      *** has the President, who is a Democrat, shown the world that we don’t take no guff from nobody ?

      For that reason, I don’t think there will be any troop reduction in Afghanistan until there are no more elections for Obama to win or lose.  
      
      If it couldn’t be blamed on Bush for signing a surrender treaty last November, we wouldn’t even pull out of Iraq, where the mission appears to be “wait for an election where someone we like and trust is put in charge.”
      
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      1. It’s a question, I think, whether the era of America the Powerful is winding down, both in reality and in popular perception.

         If I were coining a slogan for the Democrats for the next 12 years or so, it would be:

         Renewed Deal: Nation Building at Home

         –restore manufacturing prowess, even at the cost of protectionism. (Easier route: demand that China float its currency to eliminate at least some of an unfair advantage to goods priced in American dollars)

         –restore the infrastructure. Overall, our last great investment in transportation was the interstate highway system, built about 50 years ago. We need a new investment in rail transport, cargo and passenger, including ultra-high-speed trains (200+mph) linking cities that are not more than 350 miles apart.

         –replace carbon energy with green sources, plus a concentrated program to save: reduced usage, higher efficiency on everything (even computers and televisions).

         –find and implement effective solutions to the education crisis

         I entirely agree with your observation about economic security as issue #1 (and #2, #3, and maybe #4) but, absent an obvious, immediate threat from Afghanistan, I think the reaction to 9/11 has (or will have) largely abated in the face of the economic challenges we face.

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2. The surge coincides with a Pakistani offensive in South Wajiristan.

   From Strator: In the wake of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the many militant training camps run by al Qaeda and other organizations in Afghanistan were destroyed. Many of the foreign jihadists who were at these camps fled to Pakistan with the Taliban, though others fled to Iran, Iraq or elsewhere. This migration shifted the focus of jihadist training efforts to Pakistan, and South Waziristan in particular. Quite simply, there are thousands of foreign jihadists who have traveled to Pakistan to receive paramilitary training at these camps to fight in Afghanistan. A smaller number of the trainees have received advanced training in terrorist tradecraft, such as bombmaking, in the camps.

   Due to the presence of these transplanted training installations, South Waziristan is “jihadist central,” with jihadists of all stripes based in the area. This confluence will complicate Islamabad’s attempts to distinguish between “good” and “bad” Taliban elements. Both the good Taliban aligned with Islamabad that carry out their operations in Afghanistan and the bad Taliban fighting against Islamabad are based in South Waziristan, and telling the difference between the two factions on the battlefield will be difficult – though undoubtedly elements of Pakistani intelligence will attempt to help their Taliban friends (like the Haqqani network and Mullah Omar’s network) avoid being caught up in the coming confrontation.

   There are literally thousands of Arab, Uzbek, Uighur, Chechen, African and European militants currently located in the Pakistani badlands
   
    

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   1. .
      
      with the government of Pakistan.

      I entertained a young Catholic Priest visiting from Islamabad this Summer, in town to solicit monetary support, and he conveyed that Pakistanis in general resent how American influence, mostly from the CIA, has undermined their democracy and infected their society with skewed values.  
      
      Without ever saying it, I got the impression that what Pakistanis want most from us is respect.  That has not been a dominant aspect of the Pakistani-American relationship in the past, since we tend to view our ways as better than their ways, and insist on them being adopted.
      
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      1. I wonder whether Pakistan is imbued with a permanent sense of paranoia, three wars and one nuclear threat since 1947. I noticed, for example, that Obama’s first state dinner was for the PM of India. I had to wonder how the timing of that dinner, on the eve of the Afghan policy announcement and also on the anniversary of the Mumbai raid, played in Pakistan, which must see itself as being strong-armed to drop long-standing support of Lashkar e Toiba. On top of which, the rivalry of Pakistan and India in Afghanistan is generally under-appreciated (or at least, under-reported) in the U.S., or so I think.

         Whatever the case, I have little doubt that the presence of American troops in great numbers in Afghanistan is more widely viewed as a greater threat than as protection from the viewpoint of Islamamabad/Rawalpindi/Peshwar, etc.

         I’m afraid that by stealing the election, Karzai effectively wrote finis to the chapter of American involvement in Afghanistan. Without a credible host government to defend and support, it’s hard to see how any policy involving U.S. troops in Afghanistan is going to get anywhere at all, except to increase resentment of all those Americans in town (Army FM-324).  

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