OPINION:
COMMENTARY:
By all accounts, President-elect Obama will be sworn into office on Jan. 20, swearing himself to transform the country. His words, his appointments and his actions all arrive, carried upon a cleansing wind that the American people hunger for.
Not even the most dyed-in-the-wool conservative doubts his word. His intentions go beyond his favorite word, “change,” and morph quickly into “transformation.” And as they move along in the revealing pre-Inaugural moment, he and his team have subtly exchanged the traditional word “liberal” for “progressive.” It’s an old and respected word, less loaded than “liberal,” which has become tarnished with political correctness, multiculturalism and all the accoutrements of the goofy American Far Left of the 1960s.
But there is one problem, beyond the miseries of the economy, that will bedevil Mr. Obama and could destroy all his 21st-century Camelot hopes. Ironically, it is one there is dangerously little focus on, but then, that is always the case.
This problem is the Afghan war. You have heard about it, haven’t you? Let’s be painfully frank. Even while the Iraq situation is vastly improving, the conflict in Afghanistan is in a downward spiral that brooks no optimism. We’re losing it. Moreover, this conflict has all the qualities and indicators that Vietnam had for Lyndon Johnson, that the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis had for John F. Kennedy, and that the Iranian hostage-taking had for Jimmy Carter. Remember, it is always the conflicts that seemingly “come out of nowhere” that serve to challenge and even destroy a leader and his extravagant hopes.
Afghanistan, of course, did not exactly come out of nowhere. After Sept. 11, 2001, the men who waged that attack were correctly identified as radical Islamic fundamentalists, probably connected to the al Qaeda grouping under Osama bin Laden and tied into the grotesquely retrogressive Taliban, which was then ruling Afghanistan.
President Bush’s father and his team - James Baker III, Brent Scowcroft and the others who so skillfully waged the Gulf war - wanted a cooperative international police action to precisely pinpoint the miscreants and destroy them. But George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, filled with the arrogance of demagogic potential awakened, pushed the Europeans and others aside and pursued all-out war in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
From that point on,we began spending ourselves to death and sending our precious troops to die, and, as a sideline, making the entire world hate us.
But the American people always supported the Afghan war, and it is now often called by analysts the new “good war,” as they try to compare it to World War II. But tellingly, a majority of the public (at least 51 percent) thinks the U.S. military action in Afghanistan against the resurgent Taliban has been unsuccessful - and so do our leading analysts.
Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, writing in the New York Times, cites leaks of a recent National Intelligence Estimate showing we are losing the war in Afghanistan because of “a lack of Afghan competence; a half-hearted Pakistani commitment to the fight; a shortage of American, NATO and International Security Assistance Force troops; too few aid workers; and nation-building programs that were designed for peacetime and are rife with inefficiency and fraud.”
Lakhdar Brahimi, who was special representative of the United Nations for Afghanistan from 2001 through 2004, writing in The Washington Post, says: “Afghan hopes have given way to despair, resignation and anger. … The government is losing ground every day to insurgents and other outlaws who now control at least a third of the country.”
And an international policy institute, the International Council on Security and Development, in a recent report, says Taliban militants now have a fixed presence in nearly three-quarters of Afghanistan, a sharp increase from last year. It further says a map of Kabul shows areas occupied by the U.S. Embassy, NATO headquarters and the Afghan presidential palace are those of “high Taliban/criminal activity.”
Young correspondents for major newspapers to whom I have talked confirm such negative analyses. In fact, on a personal and professional level on the ground, they say it is even worse than it sounds: They are now barely able to leave their hotels or guesthouses without guards.
What’s more, although the president-elect has repeatedly, and always with intellectual reasoning, called for moving troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, the fact is that by making Afghanistan the central front in the war against terrorism, he has already put his foreign policy in danger. The Pentagon, for instance, already plans to send more than 20,000 additional troops there, and has noted that it will take 12 to 18 months to deploy them. Meanwhile, the Taliban attacks continue to build.
Thus President Bush leaves the new president with a complex war that is being lost and in which the Afghans have infinite intentions and we have finite ones. We will leave; they will never leave.
So, what to do? Are we going to fight to the end, whatever that possibly means? Are we going to negotiate with the Taliban - can you negotiate with the Taliban? Who exactly is going to destroy whom?
New York University’s Barnett R. Rubin, a longtime Afghan sage, urged for the Council on Foreign Relations that the Obama administration spur a political solution among Afghanistan’s warring tribes and even call for a more regional approach: for instance, turning to neighboring Iran for assistance in negotiating with the Taliban. There are signs the Obama team has been listening to this advice.
Meanwhile, the war goes on, and it could easily come to obsess the new administration, despite everything. Nothing essentially new here: In fact, it’s an old story.
Georgie Anne Geyer is a nationally syndicated columnist.
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