IS PRESIDENT Barack Obama sliding down the slippery slope into a Vietnam-style quagmire in Afghanistan? By all accounts, the classified, 20-plus-page report that Gen Stanley McChrystal, the US commander in Afghanistan, delivered to his superiors at the Pentagon on Monday has not yet reached the president’s desk.
Yet commentators yesterday warned it’s “time to get out of Afghanistan” and that “Afghanistan may be Obama’s Vietnam”.
Gen McChrystal’s report is believed to prepare the way for a Pentagon request for further troop increases to protect Afghan civilians and train Afghan security forces. The Kabul government yesterday praised Gen McChrystal’s emphasis on a “civilian uplift” to emphasise development aid.
Anthony Cordesman, head of strategy at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies and an adviser to Gen McChrystal, says between three and eight more “brigade combat teams” of up to 5,000 men each could be needed. The Washington Post reported McChrystal is expected to request up to 25,000 more troops.
Mr Cordesman calls a greater commitment of troops and money “our last hope of victory” in Afghanistan. But as Gene Healy, a vice-president of the Cato Institute, a non-partisan think tank, wrote in the Washington Examiner, US casualties this year reached their highest level since the Afghan war started, and “it’s become increasingly difficult to figure out what fixing the failed Afghan state has to do with American national security”.
Shortly after taking office, Mr Obama ordered an extra 21,000 US troops sent to Afghanistan, for a total of 68,000 US troops in a 110,000-strong international coalition. Mr Obama has said the deployment was the most difficult decision he’s taken in office.
The US sent 500,000 troops to Vietnam, and dropped more bombs than in Europe during the second World War, but lost nonetheless. Returning from Afghanistan last month, Jim McGovern, a Democrat congressman from Massachusetts, told the New York Times: “I have this sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that we’re getting sucked into an endless war here.”
Mr Obama describes Afghanistan as a “necessary” war, as opposed to the “war of choice” in Iraq. Afghanistan has put the president at cross-purposes with his own politically liberal constituency. In a poll conducted by ABC last month, 70 per cent of Republicans supported Mr Obama’s Afghan policy, while 70 per cent of Democrats said the Afghan war has not been worth it.
The question of troop levels has created tension between Mr Obama and military commanders. Yet White House press secretary Robert Gibbs seemed to indicate an increase was possible, telling journalists: “There’s broad agreement that, for many years, our effort in Afghanistan has been under-resourced politically, militarily and economically.” Mr Gibbs used the words “under-resourced” and “under-resource” a half-dozen times in his briefing.
In a much-remarked-upon piece in yesterday’s Washington Post, the conservative commentator George F Will broke ranks with Republicans, asserting the US should cut its losses in Afghanistan. Will quoted the British military historian Max Hastings saying the Kabul government controls at best one-third of the country and “‘Our’ Afghans may prove no more viable than were ‘our’ Vietnamese, the Saigon regime”.
Final results for Afghanistan’s presidential election are not yet available. The election was marred by fraud and Taliban violence.