It'll be expensive, in troops, blood and dollars. There's no certainty of success. Failure could be catastrophic. But as Obama sees it, there's also no choice: The Afghanistan-Pakistan crisis has become too big to fail, failing though it very much is.
What Obama Intends to Do
The Obama approach has a few similarities with the Bush approach, with differences in degrees more than in execution. But in key regards it has significant differences and philosophical shifts in tactics. Here's what Obama is proposing in sum.
- Bush-like surge: Some 4,000 more troops on top of the 17,000 he ordered earlier this year, for an eventual total of 60,000 U.S. troops to go along with 32,000 non-American NATO troops. (Read more about US and NATO troops and casualties in Afghanistan).
- Shift in emphasis: More troops will be devoted to training Afghan soldiers, whose ranks Obama wants to swell to 134,000 by 2011. Seven years of training has done little to build an Afghan army. But Obama proposes one significant shift in tactics from the Bush approach: shock-troop members of the 82nd Airborne Division, not inexperienced National Guardsmen, will be taking over the training.
- Iran is part of the solution in Afghanistan. So is Russia and China. That's what Obama means when he proposes a "Contact Group" for Pakistan and Afghanistan that includes those countries. Iran helped the Bush administration defeat the Taliban in 2001. It can help again, though Pakistan reviles Iran's influence. Russia and China's inclusion in the group will please them: they're worried to death about their Central Asian problem, where Islamists are surging (though China's Islamists should not be confused with those in Central Asian Republics. In China, the Islamists are more interested in autonomy than in Sharia law).
- Seduce low-level Taliban members into defecting. Not as difficult as it sounds: in Afghanistan, there is no such thing as undying allegiance. Tribes switch sides all the time, have been doing so for three decades, depending on which way the cordite blows. (Read more on the Taliban, democracy and negotiations).
- Continue bombing suspected terrorism targets in Pakistan. That's a continuation of the Bush policy, which has had as many successes as catastrophic failures because firing missiles from unmanned drones inevitably causes more civilian casualties than anything else. Those attacks have helped turn opinion against Americans and NATO forces, fueling Taliban propaganda and recruiting.
- Benchmarks: Obama says he'll set them, which sounds fine, but he's not made clear what they are, which isn't. Benchmarks during the Bush years were a smokescreen for rhetorical rather than substantial gains.
- Pump $1.5 billion a year (or more, according to Sen. John Kerry, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee) in civilian aid to the Pakistani government. The Bush administration pumped more than $10 billion in aid over the past eight years, much of it military. Much of it ended up in Taliban hands. The economic aid hasn't helped. But this is where the AIG philosophy reigns: the United States can't afford not to prop up the Pakistani economy and civilian government any way it can.
What Obama Does Not Intend to Do
What the president didn't say may sound as loud as what he did. Some of those silences are startling:
- No promise of capturing Osama bin Laden or his Number 2, Ayman al Zawahiri. That's a startling switch from his statement in the Oct. 7, 2008 debate with John McCain, when Obama said: ""We will kill bin Laden. We will crush al Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority," Obama said during the presidential debate on October 7." But Obama had began sliding his way out of that commitment by January. "My preference obviously would be to capture or kill him," he told Katie Couric days before taking office. "But if we have so tightened the noose that he's in a cave somewhere and can't even communicate with his operatives, then we will meet our goal of protecting America." And now he doesn't even mention bin laden in his entire Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy speech, except cursively when he mentions the oldest news of all--that "al Qaeda and its extremist allies have moved across the border to the remote areas of the Pakistani frontier."
- No more mentions of Afghan democracy. Obama is still paying lip-service to Pakistan's democracy, as in deed Pakistan's own establishment does, but that chimera is being abandoned in Afghanistan. Defending human rights in Afghanistan got a couple of cursory mentions, but the Obama administration's record in that regard is as dismal in Afghanistan as was the Bush administration's, and not just because the Taliban is in charge of so much of the country. (Read more about the return of religious repression in Afghanistan.)
- No mention of a withdrawal date for U.S. troops or of an exit strategy. No mention of ending the war in Afghanistan, as Obama promised to do in Iraq. That's the most damning silence of all, the kind of silence you hear as a recurring echo in the graveyard of empires.
