Escalator

Exactly a month ago, while drawing up Obama’s first-quarter report card, I wrote: “Still to be scored is his approach to Afghanistan—he is currently deliberating, and the hope arises he will ditch the simpleminded bellicosity displayed in his campaign and find a saner solution to that mess.”

During the 2008 campaign Obama trashed the Bush administration for not boldly sending in the forces necessary to get bin Laden when he was holed up at Tora Bora, excoriating Bush for making the wrong bold move two years later—invading Iraq. Good so far. But Obama would go on to prate about how Afghanistan was/is the focal point of the revenge campaign against bin Laden and al-Qaeda. “Was” is correct. “Is” is not. By all accounts, bin Laden is now in an ungovernable region along the Afghan–Pakistani border. One cannot undo the mistake Bush and his crew made in 2001. I had hoped Obama was just trying to outhawk the already sufficiently hawkish Hillary Clinton, protect his flank from the war machine, and so on. You know, campaign sparring. Hope against hope, I knew, but I thought the smart law professor would figure out a way to do the right thing and explain away his change of mind.

And yet, in perhaps the boldest move of his not very bold presidency (as we knew it would be), Obama has decided to send an additional 30,000 troops into the geopolitical shithole that is Afghanistan. One wonders why we even give it a name with “stan” at the end, as if it were a country. Too much of it is just a collection of valleys filled with families/tribes that speak different dialects and hate each other almost as much as they hate foreigners. And they just happen to be the best, most tenacious, stubborn, punishment-absorbing fighters in the world. I think maybe the Russians learned that, after an unhappy vacation there, as did the Brits before them.

In other words, Barack Obama has shown that he believes in “magic history.” He seems to think genies can be put back in bottles, and that if you click your ruby slippers three times, bin Laden will be found and killed and that will be that. (How many times during his campaign did he repeat that odious incantation about finding and killing bin Laden, placing special, almost loving, emphasis on the word “killing,” as if he thought his predecessor or his opponent was incapable of murderous thoughts, as if he really thought killing bin Laden would solve the problem of bin Ladenism and militant Islam and the subhuman conditions in Gaza and everything worth addressing in an adult way.) What on earth does Obama hope to accomplish in Afghanistan? Why is this the one campaign promise he will actually keep—not just keep, but expand, elaborate on, aggrandize, inflate? He used to talk about sending “at least” two brigades (six or seven thousand soldiers). How very clever of him. He will indeed be sending at least that many soldiers. Michael Moore is right to be outraged, but he has no basis for feeling betrayed.

Back in the sixties, what Obama is doing was known as an “escalation” (the Orwellian term “surge” had not been invented). LBJ made a few escalations of his own, even after he eventually came to see that Vietnam was a lost cause. But Johnson couldn’t withdraw from his inherited war because he felt his manhood was at stake. Or “too much blood and money had been spent.” Or “America does not walk away from unfinished jobs.” Etc. Plus ça change … (And, indeed, the French will politely decline to send more troops to Afghanistan. Don’t you just hate it when the French are right?)

Addendum 2009.12.01: Obama gave his speech tonight and says he will start pulling forces out in July 2011, after adding his 30,000 by June 2010. So it starts to quack like a “surge,” not an open-ended escalation. Does that make it right? Does this approach make sense with people who measure time in hundreds (or thousands) of years, not hundreds of days? It’s like the kid who wants to stop the fight, but doesn’t want to look chicken, so he throws one last punch before he says, “Let’s quit!” That’s the positive spin. The scary alternative is: he really does think we can fix Afghanistan with nineteen more months of heightened US military intervention—and will probably keep lots of US troops there well beyond that point to keep it from backsliding. Ah, the follies of Empire … if only they were the Ziegfeld and not the body bag variety.