【09.12.3 时代】Afghanistan: Can Obama Sell America on This War?

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Afghanistan: Can Obama Sell America on This War?

President Obama speaks at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point on Dec. 1


"If I did not think that the security of the United States and the safety of the American people were at stake in Afghanistan," Barack Obama said, announcing his decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, "I would gladly order every single one of our troops home tomorrow." It was the most emotional moment of his address — but it was a curious sentence, and an unsatisfying speech, defensive and slightly convoluted. Certainly, it was not a classic call to arms: nothing remotely like Shakespeare's Henry V at Agincourt or Winston Churchill during the Blitz, as conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer pointed out later.
The President made the best possible argument for a rather iffy proposition: the expansion of a war that is 51% necessary and 49% futile (or vice versa). But you can't argue a people into war, especially one that seems so indistinct and perplexing. Once you have made the decision to go, or to redouble your efforts, you must lead the charge — passionately and, yes, with a touch of anger. Obama's attempt to do that, his peroration about the ideals that cause us to fight, was lovely but abstract: "It is easy to forget that when this war began, we were united — bound together by the fresh memory of a horrific attack ... I refuse to accept the notion that we cannot summon that unity again." Absent the reference to Sept. 11, the closing paragraphs could just as easily have climaxed a speech announcing a campaign against global warming. (See photos from Obama's West Point speech.)
Ronald Reagan would have done it differently. He would have told a story. It might not have been a true story, but it would have had resonance. He might have found, or created, a grieving spouse — a young investment banker whose wife had died in the World Trade Center — who enlisted immediately after the attacks ... and then gave his life, heroically, defending a school for girls in Kandahar. Reagan would have inspired tears, outrage, passion, a rush to recruiting centers across the nation.
Of course, it is possible that purple prose in the service of patriotic gore has become an anachronism in an era when it is possible to witness the insane carnage caused by crudely constructed roadside bombs each night on the evening news. There are those, especially in the Democratic Party, who find such romanticism delusional and obscene; it rankles particularly when applied to a questionable war. But the romance of the fight, the band-of-brothers bond, the ethos of ultimate sacrifice is at the heart of military culture. If a President wants to send young people off to war, he must buy into that culture. It is not enough to construct the best argument — or the best policy — in a bad situation, as this President has done. (See photos of life in the Afghan National Army.)
And that is the high drama that has been unfolding this autumn: the struggles of a highly intelligent, dispassionate man to find a rationale for a mission that is crucial but slightly crazy, a decision that will define his presidency.
"I am painfully aware that this is politically unpopular," the President said earlier that day over lunch with a group of columnists in the White House library, an elegant little room in the basement of the mansion. "It's least popular in my own party. But that's not how I make decisions." There was little apparent anguish as the President said that. He was calm, as always; a compelling presence, but resolutely normal, as always. (The combination of charisma and lack of pretense is his most attractive, if inexplicable, personal attribute.) His defense of the policy he had constructed after months of deliberation — a complex, slightly contradictory contraption of a policy — was solid but not entirely convincing.
He dealt fluently with the toughest of questions: the push-me, pull-you issue of sending in 30,000 more troops only to start withdrawing them in July 2011, less than a year after they all arrive. The troops — as many as were involved in the Iraq surge, though in a much smaller war — are being sent to stun the enemy, to turn back recent Taliban advances, especially in Kandahar province, the heartland of the insurgency. But why limit the force of the blow by announcing the date you will begin the withdrawal? "Why wouldn't they wait you out?" asked David Ignatius of the Washington Post.
It was a question the President was expecting. He said he rejected that argument "because if you follow the logic ... then you would never leave. Right? Essentially you'd be signing on to have Afghanistan as a protectorate of the United States indefinitely." And the time limit, he suggested, might give him leverage over Hamid Karzai, the recalcitrant Afghan leader: "In my discussion with President Karzai yesterday," Obama said, "I was able to articulate to him exactly what he's going to need to do over the next two years to be prepared for this transition." (See a video about the soldier's experience: Iraq vs. Afghanistan.) I asked him what instructions he had given the military to make the next 30,000 troops more effective than the 21,000 troops he sent last March, whose presence didn't seem to improve the situation on the ground at all. "Look, the fact that there were increased casualties this year I think is to be expected from increased engagement by our forces." True enough, but the NATO coalition lost ground to the Taliban this year, by Obama's own admission. And the President could only come up with speed of deployment and a clearer sense of mission as strategic game changers. Later, when I asked him about what changes he had ordered for the training of the Afghan army and police — a frustrating proposition, so far — he deferred to his commanders in the field but said the new order of battle would include "a partnering situation, a one-to-one match between Afghan troops and U.S. troops" in combat, which "produces much stronger results."
Then he stopped, abruptly. "None of this is easy," he said. "I mean, we are choosing from a menu of options that is less than ideal." Indeed, over the past few months, I've heard members of the Administration make cases for and against each of the decisions the President has made. There is no completely convincing argument that 30,000 — or 40,000 — more troops will turn the tide in Afghanistan; you can make an argument, nearly as plausible, that they will make a bad situation worse — Afghans have, historically, not reacted well to tens of thousands of armed foreigners on their turf. (Which leads in turn to a counter-counterargument: we're not conquerors; we come bearing schools and wells, with the intention of leaving as soon as possible.)

You can make the case that a timeline for transition to Afghan control will have absolutely no leverage in getting Karzai to clean up his act. After all, on the day of Obama's speech, close aides to the Afghan President told the Wall Street Journal that Karzai opposes the surge; why won't he just wait us out? (But there's a counter-counter here as well: Isn't this just posturing? Doesn't Karzai know that without American protection, he could be swinging from a lamppost in Kabul like several of his predecessors?) And as for the argument, made passionately by some in the military, that a specific date for starting the withdrawal is an invitation for the Taliban to lie low until we leave: "They simply won't do that," says Leslie H. Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations. "If you stand down, you allow the enemy — even this inept Afghan government — to create a bow-wave effect, to create the impression of authority and security. The Taliban aren't stupid."
Discussions about tactics and strategy in Afghanistan do have a tendency to go on, and on, swirling ad infinitum. One thing the President has guaranteed by his deliberations of the past few months is that he has sampled all the dishes on the menu of unappetizing options. Every decision he has made can be meticulously defended. So can every decision he didn't make.(See photos of Fort Irwin's Theater of War.)
But, you might reasonably ask, did the strategy review really have to take so long and be so public? Obama had no choice about the public part of the program; he is privately furious about the leaks, especially those from the military. "We will deal with that situation in time," an Obama adviser told me. The criticism of the President for dithering is also unfair. This second Afghan strategy review in less than a year was made necessary by an assortment of dramatic new developments on the ground. Each had to be analyzed individually and then correlated with the others. There was the fraudulent election, which stripped the remaining clothes from the Emperor Karzai. There was a big mistake made by the U.S. military, sending troops to remote opium-laden Helmand province rather than to the heart of the insurgency in Kandahar. There was the vastly improved human intelligence collection on al-Qaeda, which has resulted in Predator strikes that have killed at least a dozen top terrorist leaders in recent months, according to the military. There was Pakistan's new willingness to go after its indigenous branch of the Taliban, and the continued unwillingness to go after the Afghan Taliban, led by Mullah Omar — an organization created, and still supported, by the Pakistani intelligence services.
Obama's leadership of this process was the source of some amazement by those who participated in it. He was all business. Unlike Bill Clinton, he didn't allow the conversations to ramble; unlike George W. Bush, he ran the meetings himself. He asked sharp, Socratic questions of everyone in the Situation Room. He would notice when an adviser wasn't participating, even in an area that wasn't his or her expertise, and ask, What do you think about this, Hillary? Or Bob, or Jim. He encouraged argument among those who disagreed — most notably General David Petraeus and Vice President Joe Biden. He was undaunted by the military. Indeed, the greatest cause of delay was Obama's constant pressure on his commanders to justify every unit and find some way to speed the troops' arrival. The final deployment includes only three combat brigades and one training brigade — about 20,000 troops — augmented by 10,000 enablers: medics, mechanics, intelligence analysts, strategic-communications (that is, propaganda) experts.(See pictures from a photographer's personal journey through war.)
The real haggle was over speed of deployment. The military plans carefully, in five- to 10-year increments, and moves with the speed of a supertanker. A good part of the reason the troops were sent to Helmand instead of Kandahar, even though it violated the prevailing counterinsurgency strategy, was that the fortifications already had been built in Helmand; it seemed too late to turn the supertanker around. Obama kept sending plans back to the Pentagon, seeking a faster launch for his "extended surge." The military still isn't entirely sure that it'll be able to move 30,000 troops to Afghanistan by August. "We'll push in every way possible to get the forces on the ground ASAP," a senior military official told me. But the President clearly believes that the speed and vehemence of the new offensive will be its greatest assets.
At lunch and later in the speech, the President seemed most engaged when he addressed the public's mixed feelings about the war. "The American people are having a really tough time right now in their own lives," he told us, in closing, at lunch. Then he diluted the power of the speech by detouring into a recitation of his concerns about the recession, even linking them to the time limit he has placed on the war: "That is why our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended — because the nation that I am most interested in building is our own."
This is a dangerous mixing of apples and Predators, and it is a reflection of political calculation: the President knows his numbers are sagging because of the oxymoronic perception that he is spending too much and doing too little to ease the economic crisis. It is a real problem he faces — and, to some extent, has brought upon himself by focusing so much attention on health care reform — but its proper place is in another speech. Given the feeling of abandonment that many of the soldiers I've spoken with during the past few years have, a more appropriate message to the American people might have been: I know you're hurting, but we're at war. We're trying to stabilize the most dangerous part of the world. We're trying to prevent the collapse of a nuclear state, Pakistan. We're trying to capture and kill the people who massacred our friends and neighbors on Sept. 11, people who represent the purest manifestation of evil in the world. You have to be part of this effort, and no, merely mouthing platitudes in support of the troops is not enough. We all need to sacrifice.(See photos of the battle in Afghanistan's Kunar province.)
He might have asked the public to pay a tax to support the war, as Congressman David Obey has suggested. Or he might have listed some charities that people could contribute to — Greg Mortenson's brilliant effort to build schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan comes to mind — or he might have asked Americans to send clothing, or seeds, to the second poorest country in the world. This is a message, a resolute and passionate evocation of national purpose, that the Taliban need to hear as well.
The bracing sense of unity that Obama cited in his peroration was achieved reflexively — it was the obvious human reaction after the Sept. 11 attacks. But such unity is difficult to sustain. And it cannot be reignited by mere words or argument, even when the argument and the policy is, I believe, the correct one. The exquisite rationality that attends almost everything this President does is essential, but not enough, when sending young men and women into battle. There needs to be inspiration as well. There is no such thing as a no-drama war.

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