Wars are easier to get into than out of. After the announcement that 30,000 more troops will be sent into a battle that the president labels a war of necessity, he also stated that an eighteen month timeline is set in place that will eventually begin a withdrawal of our over 100,000 soldiers in Afghanistan. This is not an easy decision to make because this is not an easy situation to be in. We are enacting a counterinsurgency policy while also attempting to build a nation, which is a very tough task in a country with a history of anti-Western sentiment. However, this risk seems worth it to a president who hopes a strong push now will make any push after eighteen months unnecessary.
The plan is to cripple the Taliban to a point that the Afghan government and regional authorities will have the time and training to eventually deal with these jihadists on their own. This is the goal, and the president has wrapped it along a date line that seems as arbitrary as it is dangerous. If the Taliban/al Qaeda decide to wait us out by hiding in the topographical disaster that is the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, are we expected to leave in eighteen months only to see all our sacrifices disintegrate? If we leave after eighteen months and the Afghan government is still incapable of securing the country’s internal threat, does the president take back his statement about the “vital national interests” at stake in Afghanistan? If we don’t leave, do we further commit more troops and money into a war that will by that time be a longer losing campaign than the Vietnam War?
The president stated that “this burden is not ours alone to bear. This is not just America’s war.” However, we’ve sent the most troops into this theater of war and have also taken the most losses. The American people know this and are finding less reason to back America’s foreign policy initiatives in Afghanistan. A Pew Research poll shows that 49 percent of the public disapprove of the president’s Afghan policy. Two out of five Americans favor troop cuts, and one in five favors keeping troop levels steady. Forty-seven percent of the public say it is unlikely that the country can become stable enough to withstand the Taliban threat, again doubting that more U.S. troops will stabilize Afghanistan.
Why the sudden shift in support? For one, the public does not agree that America’s interests in Afghanistan are “vital” enough to keep taking on the losses that we are. Afghanistan is no longer home to al Qaeda. They are concentrated in Pakistan and these terrorists do not need to be in Afghan territory in order to be an international threat. What is further uncertain is whether the Taliban would want to even invite al Qaeda back into the country or restart their operational connection with the international terrorists group.
What is certain is that the U.S. knows of the importance of Pakistan but won’t send in a legitimate force of troops in order to rout out the engineers of 9/11. Instead, the government has been privately waging a secret war in Pakistan through the use of the CIA’s predator program, drone strikes, and a covert partnership between the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command and the controversial and criminal mercenary group Blackwater. This program is used to plan targeted assassinations of Taliban and al Qaeda operatives. Why are we keeping these operations private and publicly committing 120,000 troops to a potential getaway port in Afghanistan?
We have yet to give al Qaeda in Pakistan anything to get away from. We should, because very recently that a wolf pack of al Qaeda forces was only 20 miles away from Pakistan’s nuclear facility. As the president stated, “And that's why I've made it a central pillar of my foreign policy to secure loose nuclear materials from terrorists, to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, and to pursue the goal of a world without them.” Stamping out nuclear weaponry, especially when in the hands of terrorists, is a necessary and critical matter, so why are we swarming Afghanistan where the threat of use and misuse is severely lower than in Pakistan?
As the president prepares to give his acceptance speech for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, the world should take this moment of extreme irony as a chance to reflect on our strategy in Afghanistan and in this war on terror. This troop surge has been outfitted with a sightline of eighteen months, after which reality becomes a confusing place. As E.L. Doctorow once wrote, “It’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” Heaven help us when this surge’s headlights break and we’re caught in the dead of night in a country we don’t know and in a war we don’t understand.
