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Obama and the ghosts of wars past

This article is more than 14 years old
Will the war in Afghanistan consume Barack Obama's presidency, as the war in Vietnam crushed Lyndon Johnson?

When General Stanley McChrystal and US ambassador Karl Eikenberry return to Kabul after their grilling on Capitol Hill this week, they will face a major time-crunch with a deadline only 18 months away.

But no sooner had President Obama trumpeted a conditional troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, starting in July 2011, than his chief advisors rushed to downplay its significance. One day after Obama's keynote address before an audience of West Point cadets who face likely deployment to the Afghan cauldron, defence secretary Robert Gates stressed the deadline was more of an aspiration than a stone-solid commitment, affecting only "some handful or some small number" of troops. Sounding a discordant note on the Sunday talkshows, top aides disagreed over whether their commander in chief had, in fact, outlined an exit strategy.

The move was the administration's attempt to have its cake and eat it too. On the domestic front, that meant soothing doves worried about escalating one of America's longest wars with a timeline, but also stressing it is not so firm after all in a message tailored for hawks resistant to setting any deadline for US troop commitment. On the diplomatic front that meant reassuring Pakistan, which fears the same kind of precipitous US exit from Afghanistan as two decades earlier, as well as upping the pressure on Afghan president Hamid Karzai's corruption-tainted government.

The perplexing notion that America can go to war to go to peace simply reeked of politics. The date falls neatly in time for President Obama's likely 2012 re-election campaign, and just in time to justify whichever course he takes next. Gen McChrystal, meanwhile, has acknowledged there are "no silver bullets" for success.

It is also a big gamble. In an attempt to satisfy everyone, Obama may end up pleasing no one at all. The reluctant warrior, receiving his Nobel peace prize this week just days after escalating the war, is pinning the one concrete marker of his revamped strategy on a weak Afghan partner "hampered by corruption".

Obama must face up to the prospect of an unstable situation where Afghan security forces, themselves ill-trained, ill-equipped and largely illiterate, are unable to independently deal with even a weakened Taliban in July 2011. The US and Nato commander's 2013 target to double the Afghan security forces to 400,000 may also be overly optimistic. Even if foreign troops do deal blows to the Taliban, fighters could easily melt back into the population and wait until that faithful moment to respond in kind.

That would make any exit date meaningless. Obama would then face three unsavoury options: keep his promise and abandon a costly mess; extend the deadline for an already thinly stretched US military and war-weary public; or order yet another troop increase and likely dash his hopes for a second term.

Yet the very threat he is seeking to undermine would remain even if the troop increase does maim the extremists, who could switch gears and move to safehavens elsewhere – if not in nuclear-armed neighbour Pakistan then in Somalia, Yemen or other fragile states. As with the tragic lesson from 9/11, extremism in all its forms can thrive anywhere. It is a war of ideas that cannot be won by conventional force alone.

Although he may be eager to shed the mantle of wartime president, how Obama does so will be key. The six-month Afghanistan troop surge is predicated on a number of variables his administration can influence but cannot control. It also depends heavily on the course of the war in Iraq, now much more stable but still punctuated by ethnic strife, political uncertainty and devastating attacks, as with the blasts that left at least 127 people dead in Baghdad earlier this week.

What is clear from this otherwise muddled picture is that even though some US forces will leave Afghanistan as promised two summers from now, the bulk will probably remain for years to come. Karzai has warned that Afghanistan would need at least five more years before it can secure itself and a whopping 10 to 15 years before it can sustain its security forces without economic aid or training from foreign partners.

If sending 30,000 additional US troops and up to 3,000 other support troops is truly "in our vital national interests," as Obama said, he will likely keep as many as possible there for as long as he can to truly "disrupt, dismantle and defeat" al-Qaida and its allies, who are mounting an increasingly powerful insurgency at the cost of more blood and treasure than ever before in the eight-year war.

And yet the Obama administration has already acknowledged it cannot aim to eradicate the deeply-rooted Taliban and hope to leave the country anytime soon. Still, even more limited objectives – of reversing the militants' momentum, persuading some to support the government and helping the government regain control – remain ambitious ones.

This conundrum has left Obama's administration fighting comparisons to ghosts of past conflicts, including the ill-fated Soviet occupation in the 1980s and the war in Vietnam. Some disturbing parallels remain, including uncertainty over the Afghans' ability to handle their own security, porous borders and financing the huge war bill. Vietnam crushed Lyndon Johnson's domestic agenda and then his presidency. Obama, who is already battling reluctant Democrats over healthcare, climate change, financial reform and other key components of his platform, may well suffer the same fate.

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