COULD AFGHANISTAN BECOME OBAMA'S ACHILLES HEEL?

US Troops in Afghanistan






Will Afghanistan become Obama’s “Vietnam”, or “Iraq”, or worse?

Not long after Franklin Roosevelt won his first election in 1932, there appeared in one of the major newspapers a famous political cartoon.

In the cartoon, there is a giant circus elephant with large bold letters on its side stating “HOOVER’S GOP”. Walking behind the elephant is a caricature of “FDR” holding a large shovel and broom. Shown in between the elephant and the small FDR character, is a giant pile of elephant manure labeled; “GOP MESS”.
The caption of the cartoon is of FDR thinking to himself; “I gotta get a bigger shovel”.

It’s unfortunate that this cartoon could be run today with the exception of just replacing the "HOOVER'S" with "BUSH'S" and “FDR” with “OBAMA”.

When one looks at the current “GOP Mess” that will greet President Obama on day one, only then will we be able to learn what he and the Democratic Congress expect to do with this new, large bundle of critical issues.

Needless to say, the economy, job creation, bringing home the troops from Iraq, and now, Israel & Palestine are at the top of the list. But in addition, there are; taxes & budget, healthcare, homeland security, torture & habeas corpus, the environment, immigration, education reform, trade agreements and poverty in America, as to just those that come to mind.

The one area that I did not mention above was “Afghanistan”.

Up to now, Obama has made it very clear that he intends to take America’s military focus off of Iraq and refocus it on Afghanistan. Obama has said all along that the US should have continued to focus on Afghanistan, instead of Bush falsely selling the world on going after Saddam and Iraq. However, what President Obama doesn’t need, and what the U.S. cannot under any circumstances afford, is any more unnecessary warfare.

Mr. Obama is currently planning to commit thousands of additional American troops to the war in Afghanistan, which is already more than seven years old and which long ago turned into a quagmire.

Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel who is now a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, wrote an important piece for Newsweek warning against a proposed buildup. “Afghanistan will be a sinkhole,” he said, “consuming resources neither the U.S. military nor the U.S. government can afford to waste.”

In an analysis in The New York Times last month, analyst Michael Gordon noted that; “Afghanistan presents a unique set of problems: a rural-based insurgency, an enemy sanctuary in neighboring Pakistan, the chronic weakness of the Afghan government, a thriving narcotics trade, poorly developed infrastructure, and a forbidding terrain.”

Per Bob Herbert of the The Times; “The U.S. military is worn out from years of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan. The troops are stressed from multiple deployments. Equipment is in disrepair. Budgets are beyond strained. Sending thousands of additional men and women, some to die, some to be horribly wounded, on a fool’s errand in the rural, mountainous guerrilla paradise of Afghanistan would be madness".

Had the US stayed with its focus on Afghanistan right after 9/11, there was a chance, however slim, that the US would have been successful. Or at least, the US would have focused on not allowing the radical Muslim extremists to escape and set up their headquarters across the border in Pakistan. These efforts in Afghanistan to date, for stabilizing the country, have only resulted in de-stabilizing Pakistan.

If we send 20,000, or 30,000, or however many thousand more troops into Afghanistan, what would their mission be?

In his article for Newsweek, Mr. Bacevich said: “The chief effect of military operations in Afghanistan so far has been to push radical Islamists across the Pakistani border. As a result, efforts to stabilize Afghanistan are contributing to the destabilization of Pakistan, with potentially devastating implications. No country poses a greater potential threat to U.S. national security, today and for the foreseeable future, than Pakistan. To risk the stability of that nuclear-armed state in the vain hope of salvaging Afghanistan would be a terrible mistake.”

Mr. Herbert also stated; “Our interest in Afghanistan is to prevent it from becoming a haven for terrorists bent on attacking us. That does not require the scale of military operations that the incoming administration is contemplating. It does not require a wholesale occupation. It does not require the endless funneling of human US treasure and countless billions of taxpayer dollars to the Afghan government at the expense of rebuilding the United States, which is falling apart before our very eyes. The government we are supporting in Afghanistan is a fetid hothouse of corruption, a government of gangsters and weasels whose customary salute is the upturned palm.”

And listen to this devastating assessment by Dexter Filkins of The Times:
“Kept afloat by billions of dollars in American and other foreign aid, the government of Afghanistan is shot through with corruption and graft. From the lowliest traffic policeman to the family of President Hamid Karzai himself, the state, built on the ruins of the Taliban government seven years ago, now often seems to exist for little more than the enrichment of those who run it.”

President Obama needs to see that America’s focus should be to help improve the lives of the citizens of Afghanistan, not in trying to win militarily as Bush did in Iraq. Just as Americans need to rebuild their infrastructure, so do the Afghanis.

No country in history has ever conquered and occupied Afghanistan, and as with the Soviet Union, to attempt that goal would be extremely foolish and very expensive.

Afghanistan is the world’s largest supplier of opium, but the Afghani farmers would just as soon grow other food products, if they could support their families with the sale of those crops. And the Afghan government today is so corrupt, sending them money without the US being involved would be a total waste.

If President Obama follows through on his idea of sending more US troops to Afghanistan, he owes it to the American people to lay out the mission goals and the exit strategy. However, once he makes that commitment, it will then become “Obama’s War”.

Copyright G.Ater 2009