President Obama has announced his plans to escalate the war in Afghanistan.
President Obama introduced his new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan yesterday with a threat assessment familiar from the Bush administration. “The terrorists who planned and supported the 9/11 attacks,” he said, are continuing to devise plots designed to “kill as many of our people as they possibly can.”
Elements of the Obama plan to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat” al-Qaeda in Pakistan and vanquish its Taliban allies in Afghanistan also struck notes from the past. More U.S. troops, civilian officials and money will be needed, he said. Allies will be asked for additional help, and local forces will be trained to eventually take over the fight. Benchmarks will be set to measure progress.
But Obama sought to separate his approach from what he has described as years of unfocused, failed policy while President George W. Bush directed his attention and U.S. resources toward Iraq. Obama pledged to tighten U.S. focus on Pakistan and build a better “partnership” with its government and military. Beyond stepping up the ground fight against the Taliban, he said, he plans to target far more resources toward a narrower set of Afghan problems: government incompetence, opium cultivation and heroin trafficking, and a poorly equipped and trained army.
Bush spoke regularly of establishing a “flourishing democracy” in Afghanistan. But Obama, flanked during a White House speech by his top national security Cabinet members and advisers, made clear that his primary objective is to create a country stable and strong enough to prevent al-Qaeda from reoccupying Afghan territory.
The Post second-page headline from the Washington Post, linked here, says that the escalation means “Obama Break with Bush” on strategies for dealing with Al-Qaida and the Taliban, but the only differences I can see are throwing out the concern with democracy (meaning that we will support another dictator if he will keep his people under control), sending 21,000 additional troops (a Bush-style surge), and getting more deeply involved with Pakistan (that Islamic hornet’s nest with the nuclear weapons). Afghanistan and especially Pakistan seem like potentially a bigger morass than Iraq.
Question for Obama supporters: Are you OK with this?
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