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At the height of their anti-Iraq War fever, Democrats accused Pres. George W. Bush of cooking up the war for political reasons. It must have been their guilty consciences speaking.
Democrats are the party of extreme situational politics on national security. Almost every major Democrat with presidential aspirations voted to authorize the Iraq War, then turned on it. As the Iraq War spiraled downward, many Democrats called for more troops, then resisted the surge. It has practically been mandatory for all good, card-carrying Democrats to trumpet the centrality of the Afghan War since 2003, using it as a rhetorical club to attack President Bush’s focus on Iraq. Now that it is crunch time in Afghanistan, they’ve gone from resolute to flaccid.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn’t “think there’s a great deal of support for sending more troops.” Once upon a time, she insisted, “We need to finish the job.” Carl Levin, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, is touting an implausible plan to train the Afghan army without any more American troops. Forgotten are the days when he browbeat Secretary of Defense Robert Gates for a failure to provide “the kind of commitment of forces or resources that our commanders on the ground are asking us for.” And John Kerry, who used to be as gung-ho as John Wayne in The Green Berets, now sounds ready to revert to his usual martial role of leading the political charge toward defeat.
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The Democratic vote that counts most is that of Pres. Barack Obama, who looks as wobbly as the old Tacoma Narrows Bridge. It’s understandable that he’d want to deliberate carefully about a decision to send as many as 45,000 more troops. But on his Sunday-show marathon, Obama questioned the premises of the war. He complained of “mission creep” in Afghanistan and claimed, “I wanted to narrow it.”
If so, this is the only news from his mind-numbing round of interviews. In August, he told the Veterans of Foreign Wars that Afghanistan is “a war of necessity,” because “if left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al-Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans.” In March, he announced “a comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.” He called for reversing the Taliban’s gains by taking the fight to the insurgents, training the Afghan security forces and promoting a better Afghan government. If the mission “creeped,” Obama did it.
If Obama never meant what he said about Afghanistan — or has changed his mind — this is the time to say it. Someone in the Pentagon, clearly irked by Obama’s indecisiveness, leaked commanding Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s new 66-page assessment of the war to Bob Woodward. The memo says that without a rapid injection of more troops to execute a counterinsurgency mission focused on population security, the war “will likely result in failure.”
Obama has had only one meeting of his national-security advisers to discuss the memo, even though it was sent on August 30. But, hey, he has a busy media schedule. The White House has kept a lid on General McChrystal, lest he make a nuisance of himself by arguing the case for winning the war publicly. There are even signs that McChrystal — Obama’s handpicked general — could yet experience the underside of a bus. In the Washington Post, an anonymous Obama official rapped McChrystal for getting out ahead of Obama by placing such emphasis on population security. The official must be unaware of the White House white paper released in March calling for integrating “population security with building effective local governance and economic development.”
As the McChrystal memo makes clear, the task in Afghanistan is hideously complex and made all the more difficult by the government’s pervasive corruption (symbolized by the recent fraud-plagued elections). Nonetheless, McChrystal believes that “success is still achievable.” Unless, of course, Obama and his fellow Democrats are about to say “never mind” to their core foreign-policy commitment of the post-9/11 era.
