"If,
as Saint Augustine said, the object of war is to create the best possible
conditions for peace, then the result of the American enterprise in Central
Asia is a fiasco. … Obama has made his boldest bet yet, in the hope that, as he
said, the 'wave of war is receding,' rather than rising higher."
In one of his innumerable spirited
phrases, English essayist Samuel
Johnson (1709-1784) said that nothing more wonderfully concentrates a man's mind than the sure
knowledge that he is to be hanged in the morning. One might add, to paraphrase,
that there is nothing like the risk of electoral defeat to concentrate a
political leader's mind on what bothers his fellow citizens. There is little
doubt that it was this that weighed most on the mind of U.S. President Barack
Obama when he made his decision, announced on Wednesday, to accelerate the
withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan - against the advice of his
military commanders, who are in favor of demobilizing fewer soldiers over a
longer period of time.
Following the advice of his
military advisers and supported by 40,000 soldiers from allied nations, in late
2009 Obama added 30,000 troops to the 68,000 soldiers already stationed in the
country, bringing the U.S. engagement in the longest war in American history to
an unprecedented level. Following September 11th, when then-President George W.
Bush invaded Afghanistan to wipe out the bases of the al-Qaeda terrorist
organization which was under the protection of the Taliban Islamic militia -
the terror group had 1,300 men mobilized. Since then, the intensity of the
engagement has continued to climb - and without gains anything near to being
commensurate with the size of the engagement, the resources spent, and the more
than 2,500 Western coalition causalities (1,600 of which were American).
Now, 33,000 soldiers will
leave the country - 10,000 this year and the rest by the end of September in
the northern hemisphere's summer of 2012. It's not by coincidence that this is when
he will enter the final campaign stretch of the November presidential election,
when Obama will compete against a new, yet to be defined, Republican opponent. If
nothing derails Washington’s schedule, the troop withdrawal should end in 2014.
If it was up to 56 percent of the American people, according to a recent
survey, the withdrawal would actually happen “as quickly as possible.” That’s a
new high. Before Osama bin Laden’s elimination in May, 48 percent agreed held
this view.
The U.S. is not particularly
distinguished by having a pacifist population. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 brought
Bush stratospheric levels of popularity. “The greatest lie ever told,” as one
American critic called the White House pretext for ousting dictator Saddam Hussein
(who was never part of al-Qaeda), was taken as truth for years by an
enthusiastic majority of citizens. If the majority now want some distance from
Afghanistan, it is because they believe that al-Qaeda is contained and that the
Taliban doesn't represent - as they never have - a threat to U.S. security.
But more than that, they want
a withdrawal because they don’t understand how a country already mired in a
deep economic crisis without end in sight - and after they've contributed an
astonishing $1.3 trillion to two wars - can spend $1 billion per month on a
commitment, the meaning of which eludes them. The bill even includes a major investment
in nation-building to eliminate the medieval backwardness of Afghanistan and erect
a viable state with the trappings of a Western democracy in its place. Aware of
the direction the winds in his country are blowing, Obama belatedly
acknowledged in his withdrawal speech that “it is time to concentrate on
nation-building at home.”
Posted
by WORLDMEETS.US
In truth, he inherited the
extravagant bill attached to the supremacist vision of the Bush years,
according to which terror must be fought in a “global war,” part of which was
to export American-style institutions - and all this in years, not generations.
The Afghan reality shows the folly of such a conception. If, as Saint Augustine
said, the object of war is to create the best possible conditions for peace, then
the result of the American enterprise in Central Asia is a fiasco. Of the
40,000 Taliban, less than 2,000 have joined the Westerners. And neighboring
Pakistan has become an even more doubtful ally after the operation to kill bin
Laden on its territory. Even so, Obama made his boldest bet yet, in the hope
that, as he said, the “wave of war is receding,” rather than rising higher.
