Could Obama Be Another Clinton? (Part 2)

Pres­i­dent Obama has so far avoided respon­si­bil­ity for the war in Iraq, but he will today lay claim to the Afghan War in exactly the way he promised dur­ing his cam­paign:

As Pres­i­dent, I would deploy at least two addi­tional brigades to Afghanistan to re-​​enforce our counter-​​terrorism oper­a­tions and sup­port NATO’s efforts against the Tal­iban. As we step up our com­mit­ment, our Euro­pean friends must do the same, and with­out the bur­den­some restric­tions that have ham­pered NATO’s efforts. We must also put more of an Afghan face on secu­rity by improv­ing the train­ing and equip­ping of the Afghan Army and Police, and includ­ing Afghan sol­diers in U.S. and NATO operations.

Obama’s plan has the poten­tial to be a suc­cess on the mag­ni­tude of the First Gulf War. Should Obama bring our allies back into the fold, work­ing with them on a basis of col­lec­tive secu­rity, he will have achieved the great­est for­eign rela­tions suc­cess pos­si­ble. He will have begun repair­ing our friend­ship in the eyes of for­eign pow­ers and pro­vided a global vision of suc­cess and pur­pose for ongo­ing coun­tert­er­ror deploy­ments. Our English-​​speaking allies attest to this pos­si­bil­ity:

At the time of his announce­ment, [Aus­tralian Prime Min­is­ter Kevin] Rudd said: “We can­not ignore this cold, hard strate­gic fact: Less secu­rity in Afghanistan means less secu­rity for Aus­tralians. Hand­ing Afghanistan back to ter­ror­ist con­trol will increase the threat to all Australians.”

But the move also has the poten­tial to be a fail­ure on the order of Soma­lia. A review of the news media in the runup to Clinton’s 1993 surge is sur­pris­ingly sim­i­lar to today’s headlines:

Pres­i­dent Clin­ton Thurs­day ordered 5,300 new com­bat troops and an air­craft car­rier to Soma­lia “to pro­tect our troops and to com­plete our mis­sion,” and at the same time he announced that he would bring all Amer­i­can com­bat forces home by March 31.

He said the objec­tive of the new deploy­ment was to give the Soma­lis a rea­son­able prospect of sur­vival in con­di­tions of near-​​anarchy and fac­tional war­fare. Regard­less of the suc­cess of the new mis­sion, he vowed to end the U.S. mil­i­tary pres­ence in Soma­lia in six months.

If the refusal of France and Ger­many to lend addi­tional sup­port is indica­tive of world sen­ti­ment, this war could end just like that one, over­come by a morass of chaos in a third-​​world coun­try. Nor­man Solomon thinks it will, just as he antic­i­pated the ongo­ing fail­ure in Iraq in 2005. We can only pray that he is wrong.

For those inter­ested, Marc Ambinder has the details of the Aghan Plan.

1 December 2009 – 2:13 pm | By Benjamin Daniels | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (880)