Is Afghanistan a Lose War?

[Kate]

Wasn't sure if I should put this here, the Military section or general news.

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Could Obama Lose Afghanistan?
Why support is wavering for the "good war."

By JAMES TARANTO

It was like an unwelcome specter from an unhappy past: "Could Afghanistan Become Obama's Vietnam?" asked the New York Times headline this past Sunday.

"President Obama had not even taken office before supporters were etching his likeness onto Mount Rushmore as another Abraham Lincoln or the second coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt," wrote the paper's Peter Baker:

Yet what if they got the wrong predecessor? What if Mr. Obama is fated to be another Lyndon B. Johnson instead?

To be sure, such historical analogies are overly simplistic and fatally flawed, if only because each presidency is distinct in its own way. But the L.B.J. model--a president who aspired to reshape America at home while fighting a losing war abroad--is one that haunts Mr. Obama's White House as it seeks to salvage Afghanistan while enacting an expansive domestic program.
The unhappy past was Oct. 31, 2001, when the Times ran a story by R.W. Apple titled "Afghanistan as Vietnam":

Like an unwelcome specter from an unhappy past, the ominous word "quagmire" has begun to haunt conversations among government officials and students of foreign policy, both here and abroad.
Could Afghanistan become another Vietnam?

As National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru notes, comparing foreign interventions to Vietnam is standard on the extreme trite: "A version of this question has been asked of every foreign intervention the U.S. has taken since the Vietnam War." Some even suggested Iraq was another Vietnam.

But as Ponnuru notes, Afghanistan in 2009 does have one interesting potential similarity to Vietnam:

In none of those previous major conflicts have we seen a president lose support for the intervention from his own party. That's what happened to LBJ. . . . It hasn't happened to Obama, yet, either, at the level of Democratic officeholders. But recent polls suggest that the preconditions for that scenario are in place.

Ponnuru is alluding to a Washington Post survey, published last week, that found 51% of Americans say Afghanistan is not "worth fighting." As the poll results show (question 26), this is the first time a majority have said so. Even in the lowest depths of President Bush's unpopularity, most Americans thought Afghanistan worth fighting.

What's more, Ponnuru's observation, which he made late yesterday morning, that Democratic officeholders haven't turned against Afghanistan has already been overtaken by events--or, to be precise, by one event, reported in the Appleton (Wis.) Post-Crescent:

Sen. Russ Feingold called Monday for a flexible timeline for withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan, saying the military effort there has lost focus.

Feingold, D-Wis., who strongly supported American military intervention in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks, said for the first time that he is not convinced the U.S. is on the right path.

"After eight years, I am not convinced that simply pouring more and more troops into Afghanistan is a well-thought out strategy," Feingold told The Post-Crescent editorial board.

To be sure, the far-left Feingold is hardly a bellwether, though he may prove to be a leading indicator. In October 2001, the Senate passed the Patriot Act by a vote of 98-1. Feingold was the 1. Three years later, his lone dissent had become the party line.

As for the Post poll, it does not suggest that most, or even many, Americans actively oppose the Afghanistan effort. But there's no denying that the slippage of support is a bad sign for the president and the war effort that he does endorse.


James Taranto on Obama and Afghanistan.

Why the shift in sentiment against Afghanistan? One reason may be that Iraq is no longer a major point of partisan or ideological contention. Between the success of the surge and the election of Obama, a de facto compromise has developed in which the U.S. is withdrawing its troops, albeit slo-o-o-o-o-owly. Afghanistan served a useful rhetorical purpose for Iraq opponents, who could say they supported the "good war" even while opposing the "bad" one. Now that the bad one is no longer bad, the good one no longer needs to be good.

But Obama himself may be acting to undermine support for the Afghan effort. To understand why, let's take a step back and recall how public support for Iraq was diminished.

President Bush portrayed Iraq's liberation as a central part of the war on terror and was initially very successful at rallying public opinion. He won strong bipartisan backing in Congress for the authorization to use military force, at a time when polls showed something like 70% support.

In the ensuing years, however, Democrats and the partisan media waged a determined, and largely successful, campaign to separate Iraq from the broader antiterror effort. Perhaps the most blatant example was the New York Times's decision to refer to Iraq as "Mesopotamia"--a synonym most people wouldn't recognize--whenever discussing al Qaeda operations there, so as to create the impression that the terrorism was going on someplace else entirely.

Since Obama has become president, Afghanistan, too, has been conceptually severed from the broader war on terror--by the president himself. This has been the indirect, and possibly unintended, result of a conscious decision to repudiate the idea of the war on terror.

During his first week in office, the president issued an executive order reiterating his promise to empty the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Later his cabinet agencies started dropping references to terrorism in favor of euphemisms like "violent extremism," "overseas contingency operations" and "man-caused disasters." Just this week, Attorney General Eric Holder appointed a special prosecutor to investigate acts of antiterrorism. The American Spectator reports that the Obama administration is recasting Sept. 11 as a "National Day of Service," about "activism, food banks, and community gardens" rather than terrorism.

Substantively, the Obama administration has maintained many (though not all) Bush-era antiterror policies. But at the level of rhetoric, the change has been almost total. Listen to what the president and his men say, and there is no longer a war on terror.

If there is no war on terror, what are we doing in Afghanistan of all places? President Obama has called Afghanistan "a war of necessity," and we don't doubt his sincerity or resolve. But by adopting a generally blasé attitude toward terrorism, he has made explaining that necessity a lot harder for himself.