Escalation Gamble: Obama Orders 30,000 More Troops to Afghanistan

Hard at Work: Afghan soldiers on a U.S. Army base. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

It's not the minimum of 40,000 troops Gen. Stanley McChrystal wanted. It's not the rejection of additional troops, let alone the withdrawal of troops, that those who've tired of eight years of futility wanted. It is instead your unsurprising average Obama decision to toss a salad of pressures and average out the results in a semi-committed, split-the-difference sort of way. Not what George MacGregor Burns would call Leadership.

But like many other things Obama in this season of bells and prevarication, it'll have to do. The president goes before the nation tomorrow night, borrowing a stagehand page from George W. Bush and delivering his speech to a military crowd at West Point, to explain his decision in yet another nationally televised address.

Given that the debate is no longer whether to escalate but what to expect from the escalation (which, in a grating irony, will bring combined U.S. and NATO troop levels almost even with the 150,000 troops the Soviets had in Afghanistan at the height of their delusions there in the 1980s), let's refocus.

What Obama Should Do: Set a Deadline

What Obama should say is that the escalation is temporary. That it's a last chance for McChrystal to make good on his claim, so similar to every general's claim before him, that with more troops he can finish the job. That by this time next year if the Taliban isn't everywhere in retreat, the Afghan army everywhere more in charge and dependable, and the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai displaying more evidence of responsible authority than corruption, an American withdrawal date will be set in stone as solidly as the one in Iraq.

Impose a War Tax

What Obama should say is that it's time for a war tax. War costs in Iraq and Afghanistan are past the $1 trillion mark. Yet since the wars began, Bush passed three major tax cuts, Obama one. In 1917, when GIs went to war in Europe, the top marginal tax rate in the United States was 67%. It went up to 77% the following year. (It was lowered to levels that made Ronald Reagan burst his pimples, 25%, in the 1920s). In World War II the top tax rate went to 81% in 1940, then 88% in 1942, and 94% in 1945. They didn't grumble. They got to be called "The Greatest Generation." The top tax rate stayed above 90% during Korea.

For most of the Vietnam War, it was at 70% or above. In 2001 it was at 39%. By 2003 it was at 35%. That's where it's been, not counting the tax cuts in dividends and capital gains and the explosion of tax credits for children, jobs created, depreciation, real estate, mortgage interest--you name it. From greatest to greediest generation.

No one who doesn't have someone there genuinely cares what happens in Iraq or Afghanistan because no one is paying for it. Time to raise the stakes and make people pay. Maybe they'll pay attention.

End Double-Standards in the Mideast

What Obama should say is that if more American troops are going to be put in harm's way to ensure better security and dignity for people in the Middle East, then it's time to face reality and apply the same principle to every country in the Middle East--whether it's Taliban-Lite Saudi Arabia and North Africa's "soft" dictatorships from Egypt to Morocco denying their people basic freedoms and representation or Israelis doing the same to 4 million Palestinians, who remain under military occupation or in a state of siege.

But Obama will say none of those things. He'll go on television, preen rhetorically, look presidential and a touch martial at West Point, and, his finger wagging, make the sort of vague and unkeepable promises about "benchmarks" and the buck stopping somewhere along a play to be named later. Too bad Mikhail Gorbachev, who saw the light in Afghanistan, isn't writing Tuesday's speech.

See Also:

• Barry Kolodkin: Will an Afghanistan Surge Work?
• Barack Obama and the Mideast: A Guide
• Pros and Cons of More U.S. Troops for Afghanistan
• "Good War" No More in Afghanistan
• A Chronological Guide to the War in Afghanistan
• Afghanistan's Fraudulent 2009 Presidential Election