Nathan Scandella (personal)

We Should Pull the Rug Out from Underneath Obama's Afghanistan Policy

Now that President-Elect Obama has begun to lay out the first moves he'll make, once inaugurated in January, it's time to head off one of his bad ideas at the (mountain) pass.

Obama is capitalizing on people's frustration with Iraq, but also trying to puff out his chest, by talking about ramping up the war in Afghanistan. Bad idea. We've just spent 6 years on a futile war in Iraq. Why is Afghanistan suddenly the right thing to do? Just as Iraq was a mess, because we ignored the latent sectarian tensions that have been festering for 1300 years, in Afghanistan we have a sparsely populated, mountainous country, with the toughest freedom fighters on earth, and a target (bin Laden) who we can't find, and won't make a difference to the Global War on Terror even if we do.

The Soviet Union, with more troops, and less distance to travel, couldn't tame Afghanistan. These people are tough. We don't know the meaning of the word "tough". We only know about having more soldiers and more technology than the enemy. But, the USSR had those advantages in Afghanistan, too. In addition, Afghanistan is dirt poor, and unlike Iraq, does not already have infrastructure setup to profit from its natural resources - aside from opium, of course, but Obama will certainly be taking that away. Extreme poverty is the fuel for radical theocracies, not thriving democracies.

If finding and killing Osama bin Laden is such a priority, then dedicate some elite special forces to the job. Announcing to the world that you're going into Afghanistan to find bin Laden, and then lumbering in with tens of thousands of enlisted 19-year-olds, isn't likely to catch this guy, unless he's already on his death bed, and incapable of moving any more. Otherwise, he'll just sneak off to some other well-protected hideout, nestled in another country where everyone hates us, and his peers won't rat him out.

You don't spend hundreds of billions of dollars, and thousands of American, and Afghani civilian lives, to simply assassinate one guy. Plus, bin Laden's followers, like most fundamentally religious people, believe in this nonsense of afterlife, so what good is killing him going to do? His spirit will live on in the minds of his followers. I'm pretty sure he'll be smart enough to leave his money to other like-minded revolutionaries. Killing him may bring Americans closure, but it won't change our relationship with the Islamic world, and it won't keep our own people in their jobs.

Let's also mention our global financial crisis. We are going to be faced with some very tough fiscal choices in the next year. We're going to have to cut spending on a lot of good programs. The obvious solution is to postpone major spending on programs that aren't immediately necessary. I would argue that Afghanistan falls into that category. Cutting the cord on our $10+ billion per month war bill is the easiest cost savings we're going to find.

I suspect that in addition to feeling the need to appear tough, Obama probably just don't know what the right foreign policy move is, at this point. Who could blame him? He's only been involved on this level for a handful of years. So, from his standpoint, he doesn't need to pick a winning strategy. He just needs to pick a different strategy from the bad one we're using now, and appear to be a little less pro-war than the last guy. He can bring a few of our troops home, send the rest into the next quagmire zone, and still appear to be an improvement to the millions of Americans who are just sick of these imperialist boondoggles.

The problem is, Obama won his election by promising Change. Afghanistan is just another nation-building disaster-in-waiting. Change would be if we simply used our military to defend ourselves, rather than to impose our way-of-life on the unwilling and incapable.

Posted at 01:25PM Nov 11, 2008 by Nathan in Politics  |  Comments[1]