Weer bij de afgrond

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

De geschiedenis herhaalt zich heel vaak, zo ook hier.
Een twijfelende leider, corrupte omstanders, drugs en nog meer drugs.

Groet / Cees

PS Als er nog twijfels waren wat we in Afganistan doen, dan is het nu toch
wel duidelijk: de broer van Karzai helpen die tankauto's met chemicalien
(die ongestoord kunnen rijden) te gebruiken.
Oh ja, en natuurlijk de lokale bevolking helpen op lokaal nivo, en
daarnaast op landelijk nivo zorgen dat ze altijd hulp nodig zullen hebben.

September 27, 2009
Obama at the Precipice
By FRANK RICH

THE most intriguing, and possibly most fateful, news of last week could
not be found in the health care horse-trading in Congress, or in the
international zoo at the United Nations, or in the Iran slapdown in
Pittsburgh. It was an item tucked into a blog at ABCNews.com. George
Stephanopoulos reported that the new “must-read book” for President
Obama’s war team is “Lessons in Disaster” by Gordon M. Goldstein, a
foreign-policy scholar who had collaborated with McGeorge Bundy, the
Kennedy-Johnson national security adviser, on writing a Robert
McNamara-style mea culpa about his role as an architect of the Vietnam
War.

Bundy left his memoir unfinished at his death in 1996. Goldstein’s book,
drawn from Bundy’s ruminations and deep new research, is full of fresh
information on how the best and the brightest led America into the fiasco.
“Lessons in Disaster” caused only a modest stir when published in
November, but The Times Book Review cheered it as “an extraordinary
cautionary tale for all Americans.” The reviewer was, of all people, the
diplomat Richard Holbrooke, whose career began in Vietnam and who would
later be charged with the Afghanistan-Pakistan crisis by the new Obama
administration.

Holbrooke’s verdict on “Lessons in Disaster” was not only correct but more
prescient than even he could have imagined. This book’s intimate account
of White House decision-making is almost literally being replayed in
Washington (with Holbrooke himself as a principal actor) as the new
president sets a course for the war in Afghanistan. The time for all
Americans to catch up with this extraordinary cautionary tale is now.

Analogies between Vietnam and Afghanistan are the rage these days. Some
are wrong, inexact or speculative. We don’t know whether Afghanistan would
be a quagmire, let alone that it could remotely bulk up to the war in
Vietnam, which, at its peak, involved 535,000 American troops. But what
happened after L.B.J. Americanized the war in 1965 is Vietnam’s
apocalyptic climax. What’s most relevant to our moment is the war’s and
Goldstein’s first chapter, set in 1961. That’s where we see the hawkish
young President Kennedy wrestling with Vietnam during his first months in
office.

The remarkable parallels to 2009 became clear last week, when the Obama
administration’s internal conflicts about Afghanistan spilled onto the
front page. On Monday The Washington Post published Bob Woodward’s account
of a confidential assessment by the top United States and NATO commander
in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, warning that there could be
“mission failure” if more troops aren’t added in the next 12 months. In
Wednesday’s Times White House officials implicitly pushed back against the
leak of McChrystal’s report by saying that the president is “exploring
alternatives to a major troop increase in Afghanistan.”

As Goldstein said to me last week, it’s “eerie” how closely even these
political maneuvers track those of a half-century ago, when J.F.K. was
weighing whether to send combat troops to Vietnam. Military leaders
lobbied for their new mission by planting leaks in the press. Kennedy
fired back by authorizing his own leaks, which, like Obama’s, indicated
his reservations about whether American combat forces could turn a
counterinsurgency strategy into a winnable war.

Within Kennedy’s administration, most supported the Joint Chiefs’ repeated
call for combat troops, including the secretaries of defense (McNamara)
and state (Dean Rusk) and Gen. Maxwell Taylor, the president’s special
military adviser. The highest-ranking dissenter was George Ball, the
undersecretary of state. Mindful of the French folly in Vietnam, he
predicted that “within five years we’ll have 300,000 men in the paddies
and jungles and never find them again.” In the current administration’s
internal Afghanistan debate, Goldstein observes, Joe Biden uncannily
echoes Ball’s dissenting role.

Though Kennedy was outnumbered in his own White House — and though he had
once called Vietnam “the cornerstone of the free world in Southeast Asia”
— he ultimately refused to authorize combat troops. He instead limited
America’s military role to advisory missions. That policy, set in November
1961, would only be reversed, to tragic ends, after his death. As Bundy
wrote in a memo that year, the new president had learned the hard way,
from the Bay of Pigs disaster in April, that he “must second-guess even
military plans.” Or, as Goldstein crystallizes the overall lesson of
J.F.K.’s lonely call on Vietnam strategy: “Counselors advise but
presidents decide.”

Obama finds himself at that same lonely decision point now. Though he came
to the presidency declaring Afghanistan a “war of necessity,”
circumstances have since changed. While the Taliban thrives there, Al
Qaeda’s ground zero is next-door in nuclear-armed Pakistan. Last month’s
blatantly corrupt, and arguably stolen, Afghanistan election ended any
pretense that Hamid Karzai is a credible counter to the Taliban or a
legitimate partner for America in a counterinsurgency project of enormous
risk and cost. Indeed, Karzai, whose brother is a reputed narcotics
trafficker, is a double for Ngo Dinh Diem, the corrupt South Vietnamese
president whose brother also presided over a vast, government-sanctioned
criminal enterprise in the early 1960s. And unlike Kennedy, whose C.I.A.
helped take out the Diem brothers, Obama doesn’t have a coup in his
toolbox.

Goldstein points out there are other indisputable then-and-now analogies
as well. Much as Vietnam could not be secured over the centuries by China,
France, Japan or the United States, so Afghanistan has been a notorious
graveyard for the ambitions of Alexander the Great, the British and the
Soviets. “Some states in world politics are simply not susceptible to
intervention by the great powers,” Goldstein told me. He also notes that
the insurgencies in Afghanistan and Vietnam share the same geographical
advantage. As the porous border of neighboring North Vietnam provided
sanctuary and facilitated support to our enemy then, so Pakistan serves
our enemy today.

Most worrisome, in Goldstein’s view, is the notion that a recycling of
America’s failed “clear and hold” strategy in Vietnam could work in
Afghanistan. How can American forces protect the population, let alone
help build a functioning nation, in a tribal narco-state consisting of
some 40,000 mostly rural villages over an area larger than California and
New York combined?

Even if we routed the Taliban in another decade or two, after countless
casualties and billions of dollars, how would that stop Al Qaeda from
coalescing in Somalia or some other criminal host state? How would a
Taliban-free Afghanistan stop a jihadist trained in Pakistan’s Qaeda camps
from mounting a terrorist plot in Denver and Queens?

Already hawks are arguing that any deviation from McChrystal’s
combat-troop requests is tantamount to surrender and “immediate
withdrawal.” But that all-in or all-out argument, a fixture of the Iraq
debate, is just as false a choice here. Obama is not contemplating either
surrender to terrorists or withdrawal from Afghanistan. One prime
alternative is the counterterrorism plan championed by Biden. As The Times
reported, it would scale back American forces in Afghanistan to “focus
more on rooting out Al Qaeda there and in Pakistan.”

Obama’s decision, whichever it is, will demand all the wisdom and
political courage he can muster. If he adds combat troops, he’ll be
extending a deteriorating eight-year-long war without a majority of his
country or his own party behind him. He’ll have to explain why more
American lives should be yoked to the Karzai “government.” He’ll have to
be honest in estimating the cost. (The Iraq war, which the Bush
administration priced at $50 to $60 billion, is at roughly $1 trillion and
counting.) He will have to finally ask recession-battered Americans what
his predecessor never did: How much — and what — are you willing to
sacrifice in blood and treasure for the mission?

If Obama instead decides to embrace some variation on the Biden option,
he’ll have a different challenge. He’ll face even more violent attacks
than he did this summer. When George Will wrote a recent column titled
“Time to Get Out of Afghanistan,” he was accused of “urging retreat and
accepting defeat” (by William Kristol) and of “waving the bloody shirt”
(by Fred Kagan, an official adviser to McChrystal who, incredibly enough,
freelances as a blogger at National Review). The editorial page at Will’s
home paper, The Washington Post, declared that deviating from McChrystal’s
demand for more troops “would both dishonor and endanger this country.” If
a conservative columnist can provoke neocon invective this hysterical,
just imagine what will be hurled at Obama.

But the author of “Lessons in Disaster” does not believe that a change in
course in Afghanistan would be a disaster for Obama’s young presidency.
“His greatest qualities as president,” Goldstein says, “are his quality of
mind and his quality of judgment — his dispassionate ability to analyze a
situation. If he was able to do that here, he might more than survive a
short-term hit from the military and right-wing pundits. He would
establish his credibility as a president who will override his advisers
when a strategy doesn’t make sense.”

Either way, it’s up to the president to decide what he thinks is right for
the country’s security, the politics be damned. That he has temporarily
pressed the pause button to think it through while others, including some
of his own generals, try to lock him in is not a sign of indecisiveness
but of confidence and strength. It is, perhaps, Obama’s most significant
down payment yet on being, in the most patriotic sense, Kennedyesque.

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