Push
and pull in Obama's withdrawal By Dinesh Sharma
United States
President Barack Obama's decision to escalate the
war in Afghanistan by sending in 33,000 surge
troops in late 2009 was a brave and calculated
move. The once anti-war candidate and Noble Peace
Prize winner transformed himself into a wartime
president after much deliberation. This was
vintage Obama, slow, studied and a measured
decision-maker, with input from everyone on his
team, as Bob Woodward described in Obama's
War.
This was one of the most critical
decisions of his presidency, many political
pundits declared. "Obama now faces a challenge
that has confronted other transformative leaders
in previous generations. To paraphrase Robert
Frost, is Obama going to take the path less
traveled? Will he succeed in bringing peace to the
Afghan valley? Or, will he be mired by the same
obstacles that crippled Alexander the Great, Queen
Victoria's loyal soldiers, and
Leonid Brezhnev's comrades? The
AfPak strategy may cast a long shadow on Obama's
leadership and presidency," I blogged on the Daily
Kos. [1]
Now, his decision to bring the
troops back home, with the explicitly defined
mission already achieved, is indeed another major
milestone. A noble retreat or a calculated gamble
to please every voting block for the 2012 election
pundits are asking on both sides of the political
divide?
"When I announced this surge at
West Point, we set clear objectives: to refocus on
al-Qaeda, to reverse the Taliban's momentum, and
train Afghan security forces to defend their own
country," Obama said on June 22. Now, we may be
moving from a counter-terrorism mission to a
counter-insurgency mission, although the messaging
on this point may not be very clear; to be sure,
it is a well thought out decision, as Arturo Munoz
of the Rand Corporation suggested to this
correspondent in a recent interview.
Afghanistan has been "the graveyard of
empires", as Seth Jones at Rand, a Santa
Monica-based think-tank, has described in great
detail. Obama is aware of history from Alexander
the Great to George W Bush. Most of all, America
does not want to get mired inside a country that
is by all accounts hard to govern and even harder
to occupy for long; it is politically
decentralized, tribal, fractious, and full of
difficult rugged terrain. The political and
economic will for the Afghan war has been falling
not just in the US but all across Europe.
If you are looking for a catchy headline,
here it is: "You could say that the West is
retreating from Afghanistan," said Munoz. This is
what will happen effectively with the 2014
deadline when US and North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) forces pull out.
"Even
in the estimate of the West's own specialists and
institutions, 'nation-building' in Afghanistan has
been flawed in its very conception. It has so far
produced a puppet president dependent for his
survival on foreign mercenaries, a corrupt and
abusive police force, a 'non-functioning'
judiciary, a thriving criminal layer, and a
deepening social and economic crisis," according
to Tariq Ali of the New Left Review in London.
Ali, who sits politically to the left of
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, has been part
of the "professional left" for many years; recall,
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs chiding
the left before the 2010 mid-term elections. Will
the progressive left feel sufficiently empowered
now that Obama has finally delivered what he
promised in Afghanistan? Unfortunately, Obama
could not have pulled out of Afghanistan fast
enough for the progressives to be happy.
However, Obama has burnished his foreign
policy credentials significantly during the Afghan
mission: He has surged, pushed the enemy back,
killed the public enemy number one (Osama bin
Laden), and is now bringing the troops back home.
After 10 years, the battle has seemingly been won,
even while "the Great Game" continues.
To
the consternation and dismay of many of his
opponents on the right, who still accuse him of
bowing to foreign kings and hanging around with
dictators, Obama could not have done better by
executing what Ali and others accused him of in
the book The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home,
War Abroad, that is, following Bush's war
policies except with more precision, exactness and
rapidity.
As Stephen Carter has accurately
documented in The Violence of Peace, while
Obama's foreign policy may have changed towards
Afghanistan, to the disappointment of many of his
supporters he did not alter the American way of
war.
What has not been demonstrated at
least thus far is whether America's Armed
Humanitarians, as Nathan Hodge calls them in a
book with the same name, can hold down peace in
the region. This is the other half of the mission
not yet accomplished; that is, planting the
rosebuds of peace in a region that has been
ravaged by decades of war.
Many of Obama's
critics claim that he is bringing the troops home
for political gains. Is Obama a "pragmatic
idealist" or a "naive realist"? The debate will
continue. It is clear that Obama can think from
both sides of his brain; even US statesman Henry
Kissinger conceded this to CNN's Fareed Zakaria
when asked about Obama's leadership style.
Kissinger said, "He believes that you can
sweep the world with the power of ideas, but he
actually looks at the world and sees what is
actually happening," a pragmatic public thinker
walking in the shoes of an American president, as
historian James Kloppenberg has described Obama
[2].
We don't know how Obama's calculated,
yet noble gamble to bring about peace in the AfPak
region will pay off. Here is the timeline of how
it should happen in the coming years, according to
Munoz: 5,000 to 10,000 of the estimated 100,000
troops should begin coming home immediately; these
are essentially the non-combative "support units".
Theoretically, this will not have a huge impact on
the fighting during the 2011 season.
Then,
33,000 will return home in 2012 by the end of the
summer, which means they have essentially
one-and-a-half seasons to fight in the field until
May or June of 2012; this may have an impact on
the fighting next year. An estimated 67,000 to
70,000 troops will remain in Afghanistan until
2014, at which point according to the NATO
deadline, all troops except an "advisory mission"
consisting of estimated 30,000 troops will stay in
Afghanistan.
The Obama administration is
wagering that by 2012 and no later than 2014 the
Afghan National Army can effectively patrol its
own security, maintain a semblance of law and
order, and hold a functioning government in place.
There is no predictive model that can
determine the future with certainty, but with
adequate advisory resources, manpower and guidance
we can shape a new destiny for the Afghan people.
As Bing West, a former US Marine and
president Ronald Reagan adviser in his book The
Wrong War has suggested, as long as Americans
do the fighting the Afghans will hold back. We
need to let the Afghans fight their own battles;
they are good at it.
The evidence on the
development aid spent during the past 10 years is
also encouraging, according to Rand's Munoz, with
clear signs of improvement in education and health
when compared with internal benchmarks or those
from Bangladesh and Pakistan. After the 2014
deadline, there will certainly be a power vacuum
in the AfPak region, with all of the neighboring
countries vying for geopolitical and strategic
advantage; China, Iran, India, Pakistan, Russia
and Uzbekistan are already jockeying for position.
Another chapter in the Great Game will
commence, this time not just with oil pipelines
and open seaports in mind, but about the recently
discovered vast mineral riches worth an estimated
$1 trillion to be mined; perhaps, these new-found
treasures will be sufficient enough to transform
Afghanistan's economy from within rather than
relying on development aid or the illicit drug
trade to jump-start growth.
Dinesh
Sharma is a regular contributor to Asia Times
Online and author of Barack Obama in Hawaii
and Indonesia: The Making of a Global President
(ABC-CLIO/Praeger, 2011).
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