Cole in Salon: Obama's Vietnam?
My column is out in Salon.com: "Obama's Vietnam? Friday's airstrikes are evidence Obama will take the hard line he promised in Pakistan and Afghanistan. But he should remember what happened to another president who inherited a war.
Excerpt:
"On Friday, President Barack Obama ordered an Air Force drone to bomb two separate Pakistani villages, killing what Pakistani officials said were 22 individuals, including between four and seven foreign fighters. Many of Obama's initiatives in his first few days in office -- preparing to depart Iraq, ending torture and closing Guantánamo -- were aimed at signaling a sharp turn away from Bush administration policies. In contrast, the headline about the strike in Waziristan could as easily have appeared in December with "President Bush" substituted for "President Obama." Pundits are already worrying that Obama may be falling into the Lyndon Johnson Vietnam trap, of escalating a predecessor's halfhearted war into a major quagmire. What does Obama's first military operation tell us about his administration's priorities?
Obama's first meeting with his team on national security issues focused on Afghanistan and Pakistan, in the course of which the new president is reported to have endorsed the drone attacks. Friday's were the first major U.S. airstrikes on Pakistani territory since Jan. 1, because the Pakistan Taliban Movement in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) had launched a campaign to discover local informants for the Central Intelligence Agency, killing 40 of them. The two cells the U.S. hit are accused of raiding over the border into Afghanistan, lending support to the Taliban there."
Read the whole thing
End/ (Not Continued)
posted by Juan Cole @ 1/26/2009 12:25:00 AM
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9 Comments:
The Europeans will not commit to any plan unless Obama can show them a realistic road to victory.
They might have been willing to do more in 2001 but you cannot bring back time.
Current retirees were children during World War II. They know what it is like to get bombed, to be displaced from your house and home town, and to be subjected to foreign troops.
Until Obama is clear about the strategy, Europeans may marginally increase their efforts but they will not do anything substantial.
Professor Cole - I took the time to read your Salon article and all of the readers letters that went with it. I was struck by the reader who juxstaposed signing documents closing GTMO (in a year) to authorizing the death by hellfire of suspected terrorists. Nonetheless, the next terrorist attack on the US is currently being planned and trained for right where those hellfires landed. And the Pakistani Foreign Ministry's words:
"...a more holistic and integrated approach towards dealing with the issue of terrorism and extremism."
ring very hollow indeed.
The Taliban are a wholly owned subsidiary of the Pakistani Intelligence Services and there is one thing any President must know about Pakistan when it comes to the war on terrorism - it is rotten to the core.
What you are suggesting is a return to the pre-9/11 status quo for Afghanistan - we know the terrorists are there, we know they are planning and training for terrorist attacks BUT WE'RE NOT GOING TO DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT. That is exactly where we are in the FATA today and the President is right to kill them right where we find them.
THESIS: "The very first practical step [Obama] took in Pakistan was to bomb its territory"
ANTITHESIS: "The 13 Federally Administered Tribal Areas are a no-man's land that is technically part of Pakistan but seldom truly controlled by Islamabad"
A bipartisan compromise acceptable to, for example, Rear-Colonel M. O'Hanlon at Brookings and Rear-Colonel F. Kagan of AEI seems not far to seek:
SYNTHESIS: Our clients at Islámábád give up pretending to rule what they don't rule, and then they need not trouble to complain when their patrons bomb it.
¿Muy fácil, no es verdad?
Happy days.
I suppose one could argue that Obama wishes to forge an inclusive administration and show he can be "tough", while also showing "balance" by making a Palestinian his first call to a foreign head of state. But trying to shoot someone in a showy manner in the opening days of his tenure sends many more messages than just "tough".
One of the great new weaknesses in American security that W created by his alienation of so many people, world-wide, is that intelligence about who to shoot was degraded. This first came up in a big way when prescient thinkers mused on the American military shift away from fighting with troops to fighting with air power in Iraq. This may well have resulted in a decrease in American casualties--a public relations plus that seems to have been critically important to the W admin. But one really doesn't know who has been killed from 10,000 feet, or whether the right person was targeted, or that "actional intel" was just be a handy way for someone with a cell phone to rid himself of a detested tribal, religious, political, or romantic rival. Or business partner or rival for that matter; "it's only business" is as true in Iraq as America or Russia. Iraq has shown that the American intelligence has been wrong as often, or more often, than it has been right, no matter its degree of certitude. A willingness to send missiles and armed UAVs hither and yon in search of bad guys also increases susceptibility to intel manipulation. Getting your enemies to kill your enemies for you with their money is an elegant and efficient military concept, and is not limited to US stirring the Iraqi sectarian pot. You make a lot more enemies killing the wrong person than you make friends killing the right one. --James
Belaboring 'Obama's VN':
If we pursue the war escallation allegory, Iraq would be the analog to Cuba. As with Obama/Iraq, Kennedy turned away from one conflict, only to be pulled into the vortex of his own 'brave any deed' rhetoric on another.
The question remains, will this president opt not to try and punch the tar-baby into submission, as MacNamara claims was JFK's choice in mid 1963. Or will he commit fist and foot, in a graduated escalation, until his options to seek other means are gone, as LBJ did?
As in the VN era, today's strategic imperative is our credibility (and financial credit), not distant hills or body counts. The struggle is to defend our claim as leaders of democratic change, not to prove that we are badder indian fighters than the Russians were. The muj are still far less of a threat to us than they are to FSU dictatorships like Tajikistan.
Afghanistan/Pakistan is not a war that the US can afford to withdraw from before achieving victory, since AlQaeda have made it obvious that they intend to gain control over the Pakistani state and its nuclear weapons.
Words like "quagmire" imply being needlessly bogged down in conflicts where the preferable alternative is withdrawal. In this case, there is no such preferable option, since AlQaeda intend to gain control over Pakistan's nuclear weapons no matter what. There is no way to dissuage them to back off from this goal, and so the only available option is their destruction.
"Doing something about it" means forcing Israel off the West Bank and Samaria and cutting off aid to both it and Egypt. But that's not how a doomed imperialist like you sees it, understood.
You're probably already aware - but my friend Taylor ripped you a new butt over this article, Dr. Cole
TaylorMarsh.com
Continuing the unmanned airstrikes on remote villages was a huge mistake. It placed Obama on the same level as Bush - a man unwilling to get dirty yet completely satisfied with "collateral damage."
And it only took less than a week.
Any goodwill Obama may have had in the rest of the world will be erased. This was Obama's chance to make a clean break, to start over, and to show a new front, a new strategy, and a new American face.
Instead, we sent an unmanned drone to do it for us...and left 22 dead in the process.
And in the Orwellian words of ABC News..."at least eight of which were militants."
Wow...I guess the other 14 were...just terrorists?
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