The New Old War: Obama Focuses On Afghanistan, Afghanistan Focuses On Americans
These last three days, I have been busy writing about the climax of another war, while a war just as riddled with tribal loyalties and imperial interests reeled out of balance. I refer, of course, to the events in Afghanistan.
Barack Obama, with typical foresight, wrote this Monday about the critical status of Afghanistan. In an Op-Ed piece describing his strategic vision for America’s ongoing conflicts, Obama repeated his belief that forces in Iraq must be reduced and our efforts in Afghanistan bolstered.
Senator Barack Obama is proposing that the United States deploy about 10,000 more troops to battle resurgent forces in Afghanistan, a plan intended to shift the American military focus from the Iraq war to the marked rise in violence from the Taliban.
As if underscoring his point, events in Afghanistan turned gruesome that day, as a vicious Taliban assault hit a US Army outpost in the east of the war zone. The attack not only killed nine Americans and wounded over a dozen more, we lost the ground. For the first time in recent memory, we had to withdraw from the outpost.
That wasn’t the most of it.
Elsewhere in the frontier region, NATO launched artillery and helicopter strikes in Pakistan after coming under insurgent rocket fire, officials said.
To clarify that statement, yes, you read it right: Insurgent rocket fire from Pakistan. If ever there was proof that McCain’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy toward counter-insurgency operations in Pakistan was intellectually and morally bankrupt, you have it right there. Something has to be done about the fact that our enemy’s base is in a nominal ally’s country, whether that ally likes it or not.
In order to overcome a dumb media, ignorant of anything beyond magazine covers this week, Obama then gave a speech on global security, emphasizing the dire circumstances our troops are all too conscious of abroad.
It was typical Obama: The vision thing, with guts and insight.
The response from the other side was typical McCain. Rather than explaining how on earth he would take the fight to the enemy, McCain took the fight to Obama. He criticized him for everything from inflexibility to inexperience, apparently missing the irony that despite all his considerable experience, he is, unlike his opponent, yet to propose any actual solutions.
Joe Biden laid into McCain in reply.
The speech was a bravura delivery of Biden tour de force, calling the idiocy of the ignorant Iraq-centric strategy to task. As soon as it’s posted in video format, it’s going up on the blog. For now, here’s a small cup of Joe, no cream, certainly no sugar:
President Bush and Sen. McCain lump all the threats together,” said Biden. “Al Qaeda, the Shia militia, listen to them speak. Listen to my friend Joe Lieberman, and he really is a friend, listen to them speak. Find me a distinction that they make. As a consequence of this profound confusion they make profound mistakes. The idea that al Qaeda will cooperate with the philistine, a guy who in fact used to run the country in Iraq, the guy who did away with the caliphate… is completely contrary to anything that the now-dead leader of Iraq had in mind. It’s dangerous. How can we run a sound foreign policy without understanding these decisions? How can we talk about a Shiite-dominated nation cooperating with a Sunni dominated Wahabi sect of Islam as if they had anything in common? Yet listen to my friends, listen to the president, listen to Joe Lieberman, listen to John McCain. Ladies and gentlemen, if they can’t define the enemy we are fighting it is very difficult to define whether we have won or lost.”
It certainly gets the blood going. I can only hope “No Drama Obama” signs on this firebreather.
With a briar patch like Afghanistan waiting us over the horizon past the Iraq mire, we’ll need all the truth to power we can get.
Taking the war to Pakistan is perhaps the most foolish thing America can do. Obama is not the first to suggest it, and we already have sufficient evidence of the potentially negative repercussions of such an action.
For example: On January 13, 2006, the United States launched a missile strike on the village of Damadola, Pakistan. Rather than kill the targeted Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s deputy leader, the strike instead slaughtered 17 locals. This only served to further weaken the Musharraf government and further destabilize the entire area. In a nuclear state like Pakistan, this was not only unfortunate, it was outright stupid. Pakistan has 160 million Arabs (better than half of the population of the entire Arab world). Pakistan also has the support of China and a nuclear arsenal.
I predict that America’s military action in the Middle East will enter the canons of history alongside Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Holocaust, in kind if not in degree. The Bush administration’s war on terror marks the age in which America has again crossed a line that many argue should never be crossed. Call it preemption, preventive war, the war on terror, or whatever you like; there is a sense that we have again unleashed a force that, like a boom-a-rang, at some point has to come back to us. The Bush administration argues that American military intervention in the Middle East is purely in self-defense. Others argue that it is pure aggression. The consensus is equally as torn over its impact on international terrorism. Is America truly deterring future terrorists with its actions? Or is it, in fact, aiding the recruitment of more terrorists?
The last thing the United States should do at this point and time is to violate yet another state’s sovereignty. Beyond being wrong, it just isn’t very smart. We all agree that slavery in this country was wrong; as was the decimation of the Native American populations. We all agree that the Holocaust and several other acts of genocide in the twentieth century were wrong. So when will we finally admit that American military intervention in the Middle East is wrong as well?
Comment by John Maszka — July 19, 2008 @ 9:55 am