The White House announced that the president will unveil his new strategy for Afghanistan next Tuesday night. When he goes before the Nation he will own the war in Afghanistan. By all accounts, the president will come close to providing our commander in Afghanistan, General McChrystal, with most of the additional resources he has requested despite the fact that many in his Administration and the Democratic Party are not only against sending more forces but actually want to do less. But he will articulate a new strategy and set goals for our forces and for the Afghan government that will permit our exit from that country – presumable before the 2012 presidential elections.
To many observers, the situation facing President Obama is similar to the one that confronted President Johnson in 1964. In both cases, the presidents were elected primarily to address U.S. domestic and not foreign policy concerns. In President Obama’s case, this dichotomy is even more dramatic since he ran on a platform of stopping the war in Iraq and instituting a less militaristic foreign policy. In both cases, the presidents were trapped by the dominant security logic of the time. For Johnson it was holding the line against communism; for Obama it is defending the Nation against global terrorism.
It is possible that the president will devise a strategy or establish criteria for our continued involvement – such as the total elimination of corruption in the Afghan government – that will allow him to declare victory or to judge the Karzai government unworthy of our continued support. The purpose of either ploy would be to get out before his re-election campaign begins. Why might he do this? Because regardless of what strategy the president invents and the choice of metrics for success, it is extremely unlikely that success will come quickly. The McChrystal surge will not even be completed until late in 2010. Thus, if he pursues a legitimate strategy for success, the president is almost certain to go into his re-election campaign with our forces deeply engaged in Afghanistan. No wonder that President Obama, like his predecessor, has been looking for a way out of the trap he fell into when he declared Afghanistan to be a war of necessity.
All the Administration’s efforts to find a new strategy for Afghanistan are more likely to fail rather than succeed. The reality is that counterinsurgency campaigns are not won by clever strategies. They are successful when enough forces are present to clear, hold and build on ground seized from or denied to the insurgents. The insurgency we faced in Iraq arose because the Bush Administration did not have enough troops present in that country in 2003 and 2004. It was defeated when Bush decided to surge additional forces in 2007. In fact, all of this country’s successful wars have been a matter of overwhelming the enemy with men and material. At the very least it is hard to understand how sending General McChrystal fewer forces than he asked for and taking many months to deploy them will permit a swift victory.
Rather than trying to find a stratagem by which he can avoid sending as many forces as requested by General McChrystal or defining a set of objectives that will allow an early exit from Afghanistan, President Obama should instead send more forces to Afghanistan. Since General McChrystal reportedly asked for 40,000 additional troops, the president should send 60,000, even 80,000. It is way past time for cleverness; it is now time for brute force. Since he is betting on a long shot, the president should double down.
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