Quagmire

The papers are full of the steady collapse of the U.S. strategy in the Afghan war lately, and those of us who placed our faith in Barack Obama sooner or later are going to have to come to terms with his utter lack of originality in pursuing it largely on George Bush’s terms, even adding a Bushite troop ‘surge’. It is particularly ironic that today’s news is of a massive air strike that probably resulted in the slaughter of dozens of civilians, exactly the thing Obama-the-candidate criticized (and was hounded for doing so by the jingoist red-staters). So Obama has now fully adopted the McCain/Palin approach in that arena.

I wonder how long Obama can keep up this losing battle before taking a political hit like Gordon Brown just did. Brown is the skipper of the rapidly sinking British Labor Party ship and now needs his Conservative adversaries to defend the British war role. His party will very likely suffer a historic wipe-out next year.

Here at home, only the even worse debacle in Iraq obscures the complete failure of the attempt to pacify Afghanistan and the rapid popular disenchantment for the endeavor. Even the keenest patriots have a hard time seeing why the government of that country should be our concern and with good reason.

Despite the lingering emotions associated with 9/11, its impact on policy is just not the same as it was eight years ago. It never made much sense to turn the pursuit of the bin Laden gang into the conquest and occupation of Afghanistan even though the Twin Towers attack made it politically necessary. Now we are stuck pretending that control of a remote mountain range on the other side of the globe matters.

Kennedy and Johnson got led down the slippery slope into Vietnam in similar ways, and one would think a little historical perspective might have filtered into the White House these days even if the guys who run it are too young to have lived through that chapter. Johnson kept insisting that the U.S. just had to control and dominate Vietnamese rice paddies or else terrible things would happen.

Of course there’s no draft to stir up domestic outrage, but Brown and Obama still talk about ‘winning’ the Afghan war just like LBJ did 40 years ago on similarly thin evidence.

The hilarious ‘election’ that President Karzai just juggled and rigged to guarantee himself another term was more farcical than Ahmadinejad’s in Iran, and Obama now finds himself denouncing the latter while sending more troops to back the former. Thinking that this war has a happy ending if we just stick with current strategy a while longer is truly the ‘audacity of hope’.