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bobdina
09-28-2009, 03:34 PM
OP/Ed


All spring and summer, it looked as though Joe Lieberman, the independent from Connecticut, would play the same role in the debate over President Obama’s Afghanistan policy that he played in the struggle over Iraq: as a champion of the surge-style counterinsurgency that Obama endorsed in March and as a defender of a wartime White House against the Democratic Party’s leftward flank.


But that was before Afghanistan’s fraud-riddled elections, before Obama’s new top commander there, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, came back with a dire report and a request for further reinforcements and before a spooked White House entered full-scale reassessment mode.

Now, while Obama weighs his options, Lieberman is waiting to find out if he’s going to be the president’s ally on Afghanistan or one of his sharpest critics.

In a conversation last week, the Connecticut senator was careful to avoid taking the president to task for pausing before he escalates. After seven years of war, Lieberman noted, we’ve only now “begun the first serious national debate about Afghanistan: whether we should be there and what we should be doing there. In that regard, it’s entirely appropriate that the president is deliberating.”

But he was simultaneously careful to imply that Obama’s ultimate decision should be a foregone conclusion — not least because the president’s past statements allow for no alternative.

Throughout our discussion, Lieberman repeatedly cited Obama’s own arguments (“as the president said the other day. ...”) to buttress the case for sending more troops to Afghanistan. And he suggested, more than once, that the president’s choice essentially amounts to deciding whether to abandon a strategy to which Obama has already committed himself.

I heard a similar theme, in public and private, from many counterinsurgency advocates last week. Having recently described Afghanistan as a “war of necessity,” they asked, can the president really turn down a request for more troops from a general he himself appointed to support a campaign that he personally endorsed?

The answer is very likely no. However serious his doubts about escalation, Obama seems boxed in — by the thoroughness of McChrystal’s assessment and the military’s united front, by his own arguments across the last two years and by his party’s long-running insistence on painting Afghanistan as the neglected “good war.”

But if Obama takes us deeper into war out of political necessity rather than conviction, the results could be disastrous.

That’s because the counterinsurgency strategy he’s contemplating is the worst possible option — except for all the others. It looks attractive only because the alternatives involve abandoning southern Afghanistan to the Taliban’s tender mercies, playing Whac-a-Mole with Al Qaeda from afar with hopelessly inadequate intelligence and pushing the nuclear-armed Pakistani military back into a marriage of necessity with a resurgent Taliban next door.

Even allowing for these perils, the case for escalation remains a near-run thing. In the words of Stephen Biddle, who advised McChrystal on the review, increasing our military involvement in Afghanistan is “a close call on the merits,” whose “outcome is uncertain” and which is “likely to increase losses and violence in the short term in exchange for a chance at stability in the longer term.”

This kind of war may well be worth fighting. But it can only be prosecuted by a president who believes in it wholeheartedly.

It will have to be sold to an American public battered by recession and weary of seven years of conflict.

It will require rallying a Democratic Party whose support for sending more troops to Afghanistan — the better to outhawk the Republicans — has vanished with the Bush presidency.

And it will need to be conducted with a constant eye not only on Iran, but on the fragile situation in Iraq, which has fallen out of the headlines but remains, even now, our most important military theater.

In other words, fighting to win in Afghanistan will require that Obama become as much of a war president as his predecessor. And that’s a role for which he has shown little appetite to date.

Maybe this will change. “My hope,” Lieberman told me, is that once Obama finishes his “very public process of deliberation, he will have brought the public along with him” — and placed the war effort on a firmer footing in the process.

But the president can only bring the country with him if he really believes in the war that he’s inherited. For now, that remains an open question.

And if Obama takes us deeper into a conflict for which he doesn’t really have the stomach, then the outcome will almost certainly be tragic — for him, for us, and for Afghanistan.


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/28/opinion/28douthat.html?_r=1&ref=opinion