Will Obama Be Swept Up in the Momentum of Afghanistan Escalation?

Posted by Alex Thurston, The Seminal at 9:48 AM on January 8, 2009.

Yesterday saw two important opinion pieces go up regarding Obama and Afghanistan. Bob Herbert and Tom Hayden agree that Obama will own Afghanistan from day one.

Herbert says that with pressing domestic problems looming, Obama can’t afford to escalate in Afghanistan. Herbert calls Afghanistan a quagmire.

What’s the upside to the U.S., a nation in dire economic distress, of an escalation in Afghanistan? If we send 20,000, or 30,000, or however many thousand more troops in there, what will their mission be?

[snip]

Our interest in Afghanistan is to prevent it from becoming a haven for terrorists bent on attacking us. That does not require the scale of military operations that the incoming administration is contemplating. It does not require a wholesale occupation. It does not require the endless funneling of human treasure and countless billions of taxpayer dollars to the Afghan government at the expense of rebuilding the United States, which is falling apart before our very eyes.

Herbert speculates that Obama wants escalation in order to prove his toughness. Tom Hayden expands on that point, reminding us that Democrats have been calling Afghanistan the “good war” since at least 2004. But what good is hawkishness in a conflict that has no definitive military solution?

Hayden warns against the consequences, both military and political, of escalation:

The question is not simply a moral one, but whether the expanding war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, fueled by troop transfers from Iraq, is winnable, and in what sense?

Transferring an additional 20, 000 American troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, which Obama proposes, is symbolic, a step on the treadmill of escalation. The American troop level will be pushed to 58,000, in addition to 30,000 other foreign troops. Obama may be proposing an escalation simply in order not to lose, a pattern well-documented in Daniel Ellsberg’s history of the Vietnam War.

The questionable premise of the coming escalation is that military success must precede any political solution. “What we need are more troops in Afghanistan because we need security, and eventually we will get a strategy”, says a former Special Forces officer now with the think tank Center for a New American Security. [Dec. 23, 2008] But it could deepen the quagmire and turn more Afghans against Obama and the US as well.

[snip]

Since twists and turns seem to be the only pattern in divide-and-conquer strategies, it is possible that Obama thinks being tough towards Afghanistan and Pakistan is a defensive cover for withdrawing from Iraq, and he will follow up with unspecified diplomacy after he takes office. But history shows that creeping escalations create a momentum and constituency of their own. Obama might get lucky, lower the level of the visible wars, and embrace a diplomatic offensive. But North and South Waziristan could be his Bay of Pigs.

Hayden’s point about escalation taking on a momentum of its own merits reflection. We often hear debates across the blogosphere wherein one writer says that Obama’s intelligence and cunning will outweigh the risks of a questionable cabinet appointment or domestic policy. But with military escalation this argument holds even less water. As history shows, Kennedy and Johnson, despite all their inborn intelligence, let the momentum of Vietnam escalation sweep them up - Johnson, in fact, continued sending troops even after he privately acknowledged that the war was lost.

Obama must not make the same mistake: it could damage our credibility abroad even further, spill blood needlessly, and seriously limit his capacity to launch needed domestic initiatives.

Tagged as: al qaeda, george bush, barack obama, rachel maddow, taliban, bob herbert, tom hayden, afghanistan war, lawrence wright