From news reports it appears that the president is close to doing exactly the wrong thing on Afghanistan – searching for a middle ground and trying to run a war on the cheap. As the New York Times describes it, “Mr. Obama seemed to be searching for some sort of middle ground, saying he wanted to ‘dispense with the straw man argument that this is about either doubling down or leaving Afghanistan,’ as White House officials later described his remarks.” This is typical Obama pabulum — both sides are extreme and he, the voice of moderation, will step in to split the difference. But this doesn’t work in a war when the middle ground, as we learned both in Afghanistan and in Iraq, is not a viable option.

One almost gets the sense that the Obama team may have not learned anything from our recent experiences in two war theaters. It is not as if Donald Rumsfeld and a slew of generals didn’t try in Iraq to use the fewest possible troops, spend the least possible amount of taxpayer money, and get the most out of high-tech wizardry. Doesn’t the Obama team remember that this didn’t work, that a wholesale revision of strategy was needed and that only once a fully implemented counterinsurgency approach was employed did we achieve a victory? This sort of willful obtuseness is deeply troubling because there simply isn’t any viable military/strategic rationale for what the president is straining to do. It is a political approach plain and simple. He wants money for health care and he doesn’t want a revolt on the Left.

But that’s not what we expect from the commander in chief, is it? There are always other things to spend money on, especially if you want government to undertake all sorts of new responsibilities. But the first and primary responsibility of the president is to protect the nation. He was the one who explained that the Afghanistan war was critical to our national security. Now faced with political push-back and a big price tag, he’s losing (already lost?) his nerve. It’s a shabby performance indeed. Rep. Ike Skelton had this to say:

“I said the real war in Afghanistan did not start until March, when the president made the speech on strategy,” Mr. Skelton said in an interview, referring to the strategy Mr. Obama put in place shortly after taking office. “There was no strategy before that,” he said, and so the president ought to give General McChrystal what he needs to execute it.

That’s what we expect of a commander in chief: set a strategy, hire the best generals, get their advice, and implement it. But that doesn’t seem to be what we’re getting. We get equivocation, agonizing, and timidity — because the president would rather spend hundreds of billions on a health-care scheme Americans don’t support. No wonder the generals have gone to the newspapers. They must be searching in vain for some way to get the president to focus on what it takes to win the war that he declared to be critical. One can imagine they must be at their wits’ end. How does one respond to a president who, in essence, says he’d doesn’t have another strategy but another place he’d like to spend the money instead?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 at 7:08 AM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.