www.antiwar.com
The problem with assessing President Barack Obama’s foreign policy after little more than 100 days is that it is nearly impossible to distinguish what has already become policy from approaches that might be termed more tentative. Does he really think that a continued American engagement in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and on behalf of Israel serves the national interest? Maybe not. There are signs that a broad reassessment of U.S. policy is underway, though critics who have been rightly soured by eight years of George W. Bush’s blundering note that Obama appears to have embraced the interventionist formula that has proven so disastrous. Nation-building will not work in Afghanistan, and interference in neighboring Pakistan has produced a nuclear country that is self-destructing. Taking the two countries together, it is clear that Central Asia has become the poster child for U.S. foreign policy ineptitude.
The Bush administration’s tendency to try to sell an otherwise questionable foreign policy continues. President Obama’s pledge after last week’s meeting with the Pakistani and Afghan presidents that he is dedicated to defeating al-Qaeda was intended to push a button with the American audience. He knows perfectly well that al-Qaeda has become a minor player in the Central Asian drama and that the problem is much larger than the terrorist group that carried out 9/11. To be fair to Obama, it should be accepted that the Bush administration created the Afghanistan and Pakistan crisis that he has inherited. Obama has questioned existing policies even though he has increased the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan by only half the number requested by the Pentagon. He has also increased the intensity of Predator drone strikes directed against Taliban and al-Qaeda inside Pakistan. He would be well advised to think yet again about what he is doing.
The increase in soldiers will not win the day, and would not even if it were double the number being committed, because the Afghan topography means the U.S. has to rely on air power, which leads to high civilian casualties and has turned the Afghan people against the NATO mission. More important, the narco-trafficking-fueled corruption in the Karzai government is so pervasive that Afghans have lost any hope that their lot will ever improve. Without that, the insurgency, which at least offers stability, will inevitably win, and the American GI will follow his British and Russian counterparts in the graveyard of empires. There is no reason to believe that allowing a government that includes the Taliban in Afghanistan threatens the United States. Quite the contrary, as the Taliban are not interested in exporting any revolution and are intensely inward-looking. They will also likely have learned the lesson of 2001 and will know that their support of any international terrorist movements will result in a devastating response from the United States. Obama could stay a while to save face, put a Band-Aid on the situation, and then get out while there is still an option to do so. The Afghans will sort out their own future just as they always have. If it is not a free-market, pluralistic, democratic future, then so be it.
punditman says...
Punditman does not pretend that if NATO troops withdraw from the AfPak theatre, all will be peace and light. The question is, would the death, destruction and misery be any worse than that of an unwinnable foreign intervention? Or would things sort of muddle along at a lower level of conflict as the various forces jockey for power? Those who say you must support the troops by supporting their mission rarely offer a realistic assessment of the dire situation in Afghanistan and South Asia—let alone a "winning" scenario. They are content to follow whatever their government tells them until hell freezes over. Punditman thinks that they often secretly think this war is unwinnable but won't admit it. Or perhaps they believe in the magical military mystery tour?
Sometimes the only option is to choose the least worst choice. And that, it seems, is to stop messing with an already messy situation that the West is ill equipped to fix—much less truly understand—and come up with a plan for military withdrawal from South Asia. Unless of course the plan is for perpetual war as the domestic economy implodes. Other empires have known such folly. They now help form the ashheaps of history.
