War in Afghanistan Increasingly Toxic for Obama Administration

Dissatisfaction with the progress of the war in Afghanistan has come to impact the commander of U.S. forces in the region.

The urgent call to the White House of Gen. Stanley McChrystal is the first high-level indication of the damage that the war is doing to the Obama administration. McChrystal, commander of U.S. forces and NATO in Afghanistan, was called to the White House to explain some openly critical — even insulting — statements he made to the press about Obama and some of his staff.

McChrystal, a respected soldier tapped to lead the war a year ago, has apologized. But his comments, and those of his aides, indirectly targeted Obama, exposing disagreements from the military over the political direction of the conflict, disappointment in the way things are going and, if that weren’t enough, evident lack of conviction about the outcome. The comments appear in print at a time when deaths of coalition soldiers are multiplying, and it has become clear that certain elements of the allied strategy are not working. United States citizens found out, through a report by Congress, that $2 billion of their money is going to local mafia bosses — thus, indirectly, to the Taliban — as protection money for the NATO convoys that distribute supplies to 200 U.S. bases in the country.

The unease brought on by Afghanistan is not limited to the White House, and its implications are not exclusively military. Washington’s European allies are becoming more and more skeptical. The war provoked the recent resignation of the German president and the fall of the Dutch government. The Canadians and the Dutch are now making plans to pull out of the region.

The reality is that neither Washington nor its allies, including President Karzai, have any credible plans to decide the outcome of the war once and for all — in spite of such a formidable deployment — and this with only a year to go before the United States is set to withdraw. Progress in the economic and political reconstruction of Afghanistan is moving at a desperately slow pace. Pakistan is playing a double game. The majority of Afghans — under a corrupt government that fails to provide security, job or service — can’t allow themselves to confront the Taliban, and the U.S. soldiers are just as fearsome as the Islamic fanatics. This perception is strengthened by the civilian slaughter that has come to mark this war, and not helped by the American inability to launch the much-publicized offensive against Kandahar, the supposed testing ground for the new NATO strategy.