Rocks, hard places and politics go together like awful days, Copenhagen and US President Barack Obama. Why did the president of the world’s residual superpower have to fly to Denmark to put in an eloquent word or two for his adopted city’s Olympic bid? And how — an inevitable Republican inquiry — did he not see Chicago’s elimination coming? Cue 48 hours of predictably scathing debate, and add in a 25-minute Danish airport chat with the top US general in Kabul as the public service excuse for his doomed trip. Two big losers cheek by Viking jowl.
In fact, of course, the Olympic fiasco was rock place incarnate. If you want the International Olympic Committee to take you as seriously as it takes itself, then the main man has to drop everything and perform. And what would Obama’s plentiful foes have said if he’d stayed at home? That this guy who owed Chicago so much couldn’t even be bothered to hop on a plane when it needed him? Either way, they’re throwing rocks.
But such petty name-calling isn’t the important thing about Obama in Copenhagen. That brisk airport discussion may have seemed like an excuse for presidential business as usual, but if you want to see a dead, desperate loss developing, then Afghanistan is the issue and General Stanley McChrystal may, or may not, be William Westmoreland.
The president has a decision to make. McChrystal, put in place just months ago, wants more troops, commitment and a new approach. We can’t win unless ordinary Afghans feel safe, he says; all the zapping and snapping from afar, all the blasting and retreating to barracks, does us no good. NATO is on the brink of losing. The White House has to give us the resources we need. Forty thousand more troops or defeat? Which is where Vietnam comes in.
Both Iraq and Afghanistan were Bush’s wars in the months after Sept. 11 and, idiotically, Afghanistan seemed the easy one. The Taliban politely advanced in serried rows, reliving routines from the Earl Haig warbook. Air power and firepower simply destroyed them. Victory! Except that these are the badlands where no conquest lasts for long, and retreat is as near as the next roadside bomb. Eight more Americans killed on the weekend: the toll goes on and on.
And now there’s a step change in describing this conflict. It is Obama’s war. He’s the commander in chief who embraces Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who talks of democracy’s mystic power, who wraps the Taliban and al-Qaeda in one bumper terrorist bundle. Stop Osama bin Laden here or our civilization may fall. See how swiftly the ghosts of Hanoi return. See, too, how the Democrats fracture and split.
When McChrystal wants more, more, more, he also wants deeper, deeper, deeper. He believes he can remake a rotten government, produce firm structures of clean administration, recruit, train and motivate huge indigenous civil authorities, Afghan soldiers and police. All against a background of killing, day after day.
It’s brave and determined, but it doesn’t wash. Karzai’s duff election — a “foreseeable train wreck,” as sacked UN diplomat Peter Galbraith put it on Sunday — effectively seals its fate. Armed force can defeat the Taliban, as Pakistan’s army belatedly shows. If you can deploy scores of thousands of troops in a finite area like Swat, root out rebels who’ve grown too bold, and rely on ordinary people who hate them to stand up and be counted, you can make progress. And if you can bribe and cajole Taliban factions and the myriad tribal factions they depend on, there’s hope. Corruption corrodes two ways.
Pakistan can save itself. As it does so, Afghanistan becomes more of a sideshow — one that the Taliban can be left to run, because the single sure way of defeating them is to let the endemic chaos of governing the ungovernable do the job. Does that unleash al-Qaeda? Chaos has already cracked that alliance. It won’t come back.
But pulling out, leaving Karzai to his fate, betraying those who’ve trusted you? That’s a hard, hard place. Or sticking in until the blood laps too high and Afghans who just want peace, Taliban peace, at any price, tell you to go? That’s a grisly call, too.
It’s easy to deride presidents when their toddling town doesn’t win instant glory. It’s damnably difficult even to imagine the weight of the decision this president has to make: to stick or twist — and know there’s pain, betrayal and many more rocks either way.
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