The Obama War

With Bush gone, and Obama in, the war in Afghanistan is set to go off in a new direction. What will this direction likely mean for the ultimate outcome?

Earlier this morning, Obama gave a speech outlining his plan for the war in Afghanistan. As the conflict was a key part of his campaign, it makes sense that he was going to unveil something different than his predecessor's strategy of "do nothing and hope it works out".

His plan basically breaks down into two big camps. The first prong of the strategy is to throw more troops and more money at the problem by simply increasing the number of both that the US is to put into Afghanistan. The second is to go in with a second army: one of clerks, bureaucrats, engineers, teachers, and other civil servants to do some serious, hardcore nation building.

Obama was mocked during the campaign for following his party ('s leadership's) line that the surge in Iraq had failed. While towing the party line may be forgivable, it seems that it has betrayed a real lack of knowledge of why the surge worked, and why the first prong of the new strategy in Afghanistan is doomed to fail.

In Iraq, after the crushing victory over the Iraqi army, there was this definite sense that the US should just stick around for a little while, taking an unobtrusive role, but to get out as soon as possible. The strategy was one of handover: hand over security responsibility to the Iraqi police, hand over nation building to the fledgling Iraqi republic, and hand over a stunning victory for the US without handing over the mess. As such, the general Casey way of doing things was to take a very backseat role as an advisor, training Iraqi forces from the safety of their bases. When things would flare up, the army would go in for a quick strike, and all of the insurgents would just move somewhere else.

Under this strategy, the war in Iraq failed. The basic screw-up was believing that a weak state can provide security, rather than the correct view that a weak state requires security as a prerequisite in order to be able to do anything at all. Handing over responsibility to someone who couldn't be responsible ended, predictably, in failure. Obama is currently set up to repeat this mistake. The plan is to send in a bunch of observers and trainers for the explicit strategic purpose of handing control of security over to the Afghanis. If this failed in a country with a weak state, I fail to see how this will work in a country that has almost never even had a centralized state in its entire history.

The second prong of the new strategy is basically to give the Afghanis a government. The officials there are all apparently so corrupt, and have such a little idea of what governance should actually look like (once again, because they've had virtually no experience), that the so-called government really isn't doing anything but funneling American dollars into their Swiss bank accounts. This, however, is the very definition of occupation in everything but name. If we're sending in our army, and our foreign government officials are actually creating a nation by themselves, then any Afghani who stands on top is really more of a symbol. Needless to say, if the plan was to create an environment to hand over political control to the Afghanis, is seizing political control over the Afghanis the way to do it?

I would personally say that after a few decades of showing the Afghanis how to run a proper centralized bureaucracy, they'd catch on and do okay, but is that really what Obama is setting out to do? Likewise, can a true Afghani government ever exist if the state is under constant security threats (the kind likely to be perpetrated by the military arm of this strategy)?

I very much applaud Obama's clear thinking with regards to the fact that nation building is a better long-term strategic goal than hoping it all just works out by itself. However, the end result will not be good if the plan forward is worse than just doing nothing. If we've learned anything from Iraq it's that security must come FIRST before anything else can be done. This means that Obama needs to have taken the real lessons from the surge to heart. He needs to place a lot of troops in harm's way (in order to actually engage in the communities that they are in), even if Obama needs to abandon his foolish idea of working with other nations that have no real interest in the conflict's result. He needs to be willing to spand a lot of money in bribes, which will have a direct effect, unlike when the money goes into the same accounts anyways through corruption. He also needs to understand that the Afghani army is nowhere NEAR close to providing security for Afghanistan, and taking the standpoint of "the more that indigenous guards take over the better" is only going to end in disaster, just like last time.

The last thing left to see is if Obama will make good on his repeated threats to invade Pakistan if it can't stop the terrorists hiding just across inside its borders. If so, then Obama would truly, and, I might say, miraculously, be repeating every single major foreign policy mistake of the Bush administration. Until then, it's just time to break out the popcorn and see how this show plays out.