Coming Soon

A review essay of Said Amir Arjormand’s new book, After Khomeini: Iran Under His Successors, and Terence Ward’s memoir of returning with his family to their childhood home in Iran, Searching for Hassan.

Obama Inherits Afghanistan

NEWS ANALYSIS | By Andrew Ivers

Atop each in a recent series of articles the Post has run about U.S. operations in Afghanistan there sits a header that reads, “Obama’s War.”

The moniker has been tossed around a lot this summer. But the current campaign will not truly belong to the new president until he decides—very soon—to either increase troop levels again or continue pressuring Afghanistan and Pakistan to take up the heavy lifting in the war against insurgents there.

The decision will force itself when the top U.S. commander on the ground, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, concludes a two-month Pentagon assessment of the war, due out this month. Reports are already indicating that McChrystal is likely to recommend a troop increase.

The administration has signaled its reluctance to commit more forces so early in the new campaign. National security adviser Gen. James L. Jones, for one, scolded military officials during his visit to Afghanistan last month, saying yet another request for troops might induce in their commander in chief a “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment.”

Huff and puff though they might, however, Obama and his advisers will still have to take McChrystal’s recommendations seriously.

To begin with, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, has endorsed the assessment and promised to defend McChrystal’s findings. And in a fight between political and military needs, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates will almost certainly side with the latter (he is on record observing that the Afghan government cannot support its own army and police). That means that any opposition to the report will face a united Pentagon, headed by a man who is steadfastly uncontroversial.

It hardly seems likely that Obama would opt to butt heads with the brass while in the throes of a health care fight on Capitol Hill, but if he did he would undoubtedly come off worse for it. As a young, liberal president, Obama is inherently vulnerable on security issues—and that vulnerability would only grow if he were seen as opposing a learned and rather agenda-less council of war (i.e., Gates, Mullen, and McChrystal, with Gen. David Patraeus, now head of U.S. Central Command, in the wings). That this is the same group that basically salvaged U.S. operations in Iraq only helps their prestige.

With almost all of his military advisers lining up together, Obama will be hard-pressed to mount any alternative campaign. 

The administration could hold off on more troops in an effort to force Afghans to step up their own commitment, but that places the fate of the war in very precarious hands and it seems unlikely that Obama would take such a risk.

It’s also possible that by shifting the focus of this debate from the number of troops to “fundamental changes in the way . . . troops are used”—which is another major part of McChrystal’s agenda—the administration will be able to keep blood off its shirt. As the authors of a recent Foreign Affairs article put it, “any U.S. military surge is essentially a temporary fix,” which means that a troop increase could be portrayed not as a stopgap (the way deployments were used for years in Iraq) but as an essential part of a comprehensive strategy.

If that is going to happen, however, there must be a comprehensive strategy, which is another reason this decision will be so crucial for the president—and the country. During the Bush years, the war in Afghanistan was muddled by symbolism. Policy was often preoccupied with with “generating discrete ’success stories,’” as Rajiv Chandrasekaran put it in one of his excellent ”Obama’s War” reports. And, of course, al Qaeda and other insurgent groups were virtually ignored after coalition forces ran up the flag in Kabul.

Despite new approaches, the metrics for success are still difficult to define. The plan for now is to stabilize key areas with the help of Afghan forces, yet those forces have proven painfully deficient. The military leadership are naturally going to protect the mission by filling the gap with more U.S. troops, but that leaves the president to take a long, hard look at the merit of this war.

It might not seem like a concern now, but Obama and his advisers will have to work hard to not fall into the same trap as their predecessors and let the war in Afghanistan stand for anything more than it is. Obama passed a preliminary kind of brass tacks test earlier this summer, when he put pragmatism before ideology and remained by and large silent throughout Iran’s post-election debacle. But the prospect of a stable, democratic Afghanistan will be far more tempting—especially as we send more and spend more—and Obama cannot allow it to prolong his new strategy if that strategy proves ineffective.

One would hope that the president’s reaction to a muddled mission—if that is what it proves to be—will be closer to Reagan’s in Beirut than Nixon’s in Vietnam (although the situation is certainly well between those two in the spectrum). A failed attempt to let Afghans retake their own country cannot, for example, become a crusade for America—or, worse, Democrats—to atone for the mistakes of Iraq. Obama might not seem like that kind of president now, but neither did the best and the brightest.

Regardless of how or why it is reached, any strategic change at this point in the war would draw a clear line between Bush’s commitment and Obama’s. The new president was in his right to make a good faith effort to fix the situation in Afghanistan—and the revamped mission there should certainly be given more than a month or two to yield fruit. But the president must recognize that any strategic decisions he makes now, after he has tested the waters, will bear his name alone. And should Obama’s war continue even after it proves unwinnable, the fallout will bear his name as well.

© 2009 The Middle East Reading Room