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Obama is Risking His Presidency in Afghanistan. And He Should
This was originally posted yesterday.
[Editor's Note: We're not sure where our OMG!Obama column has run off too. Perhaps ObamaNerd is embarrassed about his hero's health care bill—which appears to have abandoned the public option and half the public, namely, women.
Luckily, we're debuting a new Obama-centric opinion column today (it'll have it's own logo and all that soon enough): OMG!Sandeep by PubliCola co-founder Sandeep Kaushik.
Kaushik is the whiskey-loving liberal and Democratic political guru who recently ran the communications game for Dow Constantine’s blowout campaign (and for Mayor Greg Nickels losing—in the primary, ouch—campaign.)
Sandeep is a formidable know-it-all. His column will focus on Obama and national and international politics.
Today he comes out in favor of President Obama's Afghan surge, arguing that the British Empire's success in Afghanistan, rather than the Soviet Union's failure, is the history lesson to consider.]
It has been a few weeks now since President Barack Obama’s December 1 West Point speech, in which he articulated his reasons for supporting, in the face of Democratic resistance and public unease, a military surge—a semi-occupation, really—in Afghanistan. (Josh had some interesting stuff to say about it here.)
But after a (far too) brief burst of public attention, our deepening involvement in the cauldron of central Asia has again faded from the front pages, replaced by the travails of Tiger Woods, holiday shopping and winter weather stories, and the subversive shenanigans of conservative Democratic senators (Ben Nelson) and their crypto-Republican colleagues (Joe Lieberman – the “I” apparently stands for insurance companies) in the domestic battles over health care reform.
That’s unfortunate, because Obama’s decision to escalate the war is likely the most consequential decision he will make during his presidency. George Bush treated Afghanistan as nothing more than the little blind in his poorly played game of high-stakes Texas Hold ‘Em in Iraq, even though Afghanistan was a necessary war (or, to borrow from Obama’s Dec. 11 speech in Oslo upon accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, a “just war”), while Iraq was a misguided war of choice.
Even now, as the new president calls for a major military escalation—and an ambitious, fast-paced nation-building exercise—in one of the most hostile, anti-Western regions of the world, the “just war” remains largely a forgotten war.
We forget Afghanistan at our peril. In comparison, the success or failure of health care reform pales by comparison; if Obama fails to get a reasonable bill through Congress, his presidency will survive, just as Bill Clinton’s did. But if his Afghanistan surge fails, it will destroy his administration, as Iraq destroyed the Bush administration. And the geopolitical price of failure there will be more enormous still, because, an American retreat from Afghanistan will further destabilize nuclear-armed Pakistan. Afghanistan is now Obama’s war, and he better win it. And Pakistan is his problem, and he needs to solve it.
