Approximately 69 million people voted for Barack Obama last year and in doing so, whether they like it or not, each one also voted for a continuation of the Afghan War. That’s not the way we generally think about it, but it’s true. Obama never made any secret of the fact that he was planning on continuing the Afghan War. Oh sure there were the usual campaign “specifics” which were hotly debated at the time and then forgotten six seconds after the networks declared a winner, but his general position couldn’t have been clearer.
I happen to be among the people that think his campaign position on Afghanistan was little more than cynical political calculation. By campaigning for a renewed focus on the Afghan War Obama largely immunized himself from typically brainless politico-speak charges that he’s just a namby-pamby, weak-kneed, limped-dicked liberal. But it came at a cost, one that must be paid in the blood of American troops, Afghani troops, and Afghani civilians.
By positioning himself as the right man to win, whatever that means, in Afghanistan Obama played into and reinforced one of the more insidious falsehoods of Bush the Younger. For seven and a half years the most powerful man on earth scared the living fuck out of American citizens with frightful Muslim bogeymen. While he was at it he also endlessly propagandized the myth of fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here. That sentiment is both bloody and ludicrous, but it’s so pervasive that in a radio interview last week I actually heard an active duty soldier parrot it back. Like it or not that lie and the political sentiment behind it are still out there and still very powerful.
Obama bought into that while he was running for office and thus his rhetoric on Afghanistan remains politically gung-ho even as the casualty filled realities of staying there make themselves plain. Yesterday the amusingly information free catchphrase-du-jour was “finish the job”, but I’m quite certain that there will be more euphemisms before that war winds to a close. Whatever the fashionable terminology though, the government of Hamid Karzai will continue to be supported by American troops. Anything less feels to many Americans like an invitation to catastrophe.
About the only consolation to be taken from the above is that Obama is only wedded to the Afghan War politically whereas his predecessor was wed to it both politically and personally. If by some unholy miracle Bush the Younger were still president he’d be defending everything that had ever gone on there as part of some master narrative of tough guys with flinty grimaces on the cusp of winning the day. Obama at least seems to view Afghanistan as the mess that it really is instead of some perverted presidential passion play. So while he’s politically trapped himself into continuing it, quite possibly for his entire current term, he doesn’t seem fond of it.
That’s the only silver lining as we prepare for what everyone fully expects is a speech on Tuesday where he will announce his second escalation of the Afghan War in less than a year. Most serious political and military observers view this decision as essentially a guarantee that the war will continue in some form or another through the 2012 election, still almost three years away. (Unless, of course, we’re imagining miracles and this small, unilateral increase in troops is just what it’ll take to pacify untold thousands of square miles and untold millions of angry people.) Granting that such agreed upon certainties can often be wrong, things don’t look quite as bleak in the long run.
As implausible as it now seems that this waste of lives and money will end before the next presidential election, assuming Obama keeps his job it seems just as implausible that he would blithely hand this war off to his successor in 2017 as it was handed to him in 2009. In 2012, with the credibility that comes from ending the Iraq War without the dire predictions of right wingers coming true, pledging to end the Afghan War in a sensible way will be enormously easier. As I said above, Obama doesn’t like this war; he doesn’t see continuing it as demonstration of his genital confidence. He simply needs it for political purposes.
Whatever number of extra troops Obama announces is almost irrelevant. (Other than to the troops and the Afghanis, of course, but nobody cares what they think anyway.) The ending of the wars of Bush the Younger is dictated by the timetable of our presidential elections. Two in one term was simply too much to ask of a country as misled as ours.
