Obama's War

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Obama Administration and senior military commanders are putting the finishing touches on plans to deploy tens of thousands of troops to Afghanistan by summer’s end in an effort to quell an upswing in violence in recent years, and reign in the re-emerging influence of the Taliban.

Virtually none of the new troop deployments are expected to head to the more populous regions of the country, but will instead focus on Afghanistan’s opium producing centers, rural villages and along the border with Pakistan.

This Afghan “surge” is in part President Obama’s response to his campaign pledge to refocus the US war on terror (or whatever the administration chooses to call it today) away from Iraq and toward the troubled regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Strategically, it’s a wise and long-overdue move; tactically, it will represent a significant shift from current methods of waging war – a shift for which I’m not quite sure the American public is prepared.

The speed and efficiency with which the US toppled the Taliban in 2002 surprised even its planners. Victory was accomplished through the coordinated effort of special forces and the CIA, making what would amount to be unholy alliances with some very unsavory characters. It’s easy enough to get them to kill themselves, harder still to get them to govern themselves.

During the run up to the Iraq war and its aftermath, democrats played the safe bet by criticizing the war without appearing to criticize the mission. The good and just war, they argued, was in Afghanistan – after all, that’s where the 9/11 plot was hatched.

Now, they have their wish. But the front has shifted to a region best described by war correspondent Michael Yon:

Afghanistan is a gaunt, thorny bush, growing amid rocks and dust on dry windswept plains, sweltering deserts, and man-crushing mountains. Its neighbors are treacherous. The Afghan people are mostly living relics, only more advanced than hidden tribes in the Amazon, but centuries behind the least advanced European nations.

Afghanistan is a gaunt, thorny bush, subsisting on little more than sips of humidity from the dry air. We imagined that we could make the bush into a tree, as if straw could be spun into gold or rocks transmuted to flowers. If we continue to imagine that we can turn the thorny bush into a tree, eventually we will realize the truth, but only after much toil, blood and gold are laid under the bush, as if such fertilizer would turn a bush into a tree. We did not make Afghanistan what it is. Afghanistan has existed for thousands of years. It grows the way it grows because the bush drops seeds that make more bushes, never trees.

We must alter our expectations for Afghanistan. There are bigger problems afoot. The ice is melting, banks are melting, and the prestige of great nations that do great things is melting, because they thought they could transform a thorny bush into a tree.

Alter our expectations indeed – speaking on CBS last Sunday, Vice President Biden sought to do just that: “I hate to say it, but yes, I think there will be more [US casualties]…there will be an uptick.”

In addition to altering these expectations, it is my hope that Obama and his advisors will suspend their disbelief long enough to LISTEN to their military advisors on the ground. It’s going to be hard, it’s going to be long and it will be costly.