Obamarama: Pakghanistan
policy coming to a head?
ED NOTE: See comments below to continue following events into 2010.
Since February I’ve been filing news bits and meditations on our mess in Pakghanistan here (and in the comments). The discussion reaches back a full year, to late August 2008 — when the Americans started dropping mass murderous smart bombs in Pakistan.
Now things seem to be coming to a head, as Obama yesterday for the first time expressed public doubts about the Gates-Mullen-Petraeus policy that he’s been cheerleading since spring 2008.
1. Everybody’s jumping on Prez Karzai, even the Europeans. I take Peter Galbraith’s word on faith that the August elections were deeply corrupt. But it’s also public and clear that the american National Security Apparat and press have been working to remove Karzai since former CIA director Hayden’s declaration of war on Pakistan last December.
2. McChrystal, the new American ground commander for Afghanistan, said in August the strategy of attacking the Taliban, or is it Al Qaeda — get your lucky scorecard, the nominated Enemy has been fluctuating, month to month, all year, just like in 1984 … We are at war with East Asia and we have always been at war with East Asia. We are at war with Eurasia and we have always –
Taliban, Al Qaeda, whatever, big diff — McChrystal says the strategy’s history.
Instead, following Petraeus (Lansdale) he wants more troops for Community Policing in the shrinking areas — now roughly 20 percent — of Afghanistan not controlled by anti-Kabul warlord types (whose loose and fleeting alliances the press now generally call “the Taliban”).
3. But Obama yesterday — while talking about health care — suddenly said Wait a Second on the Sunday talk shows:
The president also said that he had no deadline for withdrawing American forces from Afghanistan. He said before he decided whether to send more troops, he needed to determine whether the United States was pursuing the proper military strategy.
“The first question is, are we doing the right thing?” Mr. Obama said on CNN’s State of the Union. “Are we pursuing the right strategy?”
Mr. Obama did not say whether he would send more troops to Afghanistan, but he added that the strategy had become “somewhat adrift,” and said he needed to remind Americans the war was a necessary front in the fight against terrorism.
“We’re there because al Qaeda killed 3,000 Americans and we cannot allow extremists who want to do violence to the United States to be able to operate with impunity,” Mr. Obama said. “We lost that focus for a while and you started seeing a classic case of mission creep where we’re just there and we start taking on a whole bunch of different missions.”
Now that’s talking, kinda sorta, in a way. Perhaps, one surmised, the beginning of the end is at hand.
5. But, a day later, front page New York Times, we get the Pentagon’s reaction: 60 pages of McChrystal leakage to the Washington Post saying more boots are needed now to avoid failure:
“Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near term (next 12 months) — while Afghan security capacity matures — risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible,” General McChrystal writes.
Shades of Westmoreland, 1966.
To my ear this is another first: The Pentagon sees failure on the horizon.
McChrystal is not yet in step with his British predecessors, one of whom in 2007 said Yankees Go Home and another whom a year later, weeks before the American elections, said loudly and simply “We’re not going to win this war.” But McChrystal seems to have turned his gaze in that direction.
7. This horror story began — January thru July 2001 — as a Texas oil mafia adventure to compel those nice quiet student Taliban chaps we’d installed in Kabul in the 90s to say No to Argentina’s Bridas (oil company) and Yes to Houston’s Unocal on the Caspian basin pipeline project.
That is: Bush-Cheney called the Tali chaps to Washington in January 2001 — one of their first bits of business upon taking office — and then again in late spring. Calling them on the carpet.
Then, when they refused to knuckle, Washington told NATO (as the Brits have told the world), in midsummer, to prepare for action in Afghanistan. All this is public information.
The Unocal misadventure morphed on 9/11 and became a warm-up lap for the Likud Lobby’s Clean Break War, the targets of which since the mid 90s had been Syria, Iraq and Iran. And that’s where Bush-Cheney went, never bothering to tidy up in Afghanistan.
This ridiculous series of events left Obama and McCain speechless, in a way, during the prez debates last year — mouthing in unison vapid cheers for escalating an Aimless war.
I don’t see how Obama can continue to try to finesse this. But having endorsed the Gates-Mullen-Petraeus policy for 18 months, he now owns it.
It will be interesting to see how the White House reacts to today’s Pentagon leakage in the Times.
Would getting out require the resignations of Gates and Mullen?
Johnson gave the Pentagon what it wanted in 1965 and three years later was a broken president. And Nixon, five years later, the same. Heads on a platter. This is the War Room.
ed says:
A bit odd:
The lengthy quote in the post above of Obama on the Sunday talk shows came from the Times Sunday story re same.
But today — Monday, a day later — that Times story no longer contains Obama’s comments about Afghanistan. The story is now purely about health care reform.
September 21st, 2009 at 1:19 pm
bernthal says:
Thanks, Bill, good piece. I posted a link to it on facebook. Thought of joining?
September 21st, 2009 at 6:55 pm
ed says:
The French Foreign Legion?
Oh. Facebook. Is it … advisable?
September 21st, 2009 at 8:53 pm
ed says:
An angle on the Report’s bivalent nature.
But it does seem that nobody in Washington is talking about ending a hopeless, aimless venture.
But neither is anybody articulating a coherent and feasible War Aim.
Making America Safe seems about all they can come up with.
There must be a reason the Pentagon wants to be there forever. Surely …?
September 21st, 2009 at 11:06 pm
ed says:
Let’s go to a new thread, as the Beltway debate continues to leak — indeed, surge — into the public realm.
About time.
September 24th, 2009 at 10:35 pm