Obama’s War

The American President’s new Afghanistan strategy is consistent, but fraught with risk. If the USA fails, he will share the blame.

The approach sounds familiar. What President Obama announced on Friday concerning America’s new Afghanistan strategy is the sum total of the U.S. military’s experience over the past three years in Iraq: 17,000 more soldiers plus 4,000 highly trained instructors for Afghanistan’s army and police force. The governments of Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan will get more money, but will also have to be more responsible in addressing their problems with corruption, the drug trade, and warlords. Other powers in the region, from Russia and China to Saudi-Arabia, India and on to Iran will have to play a more active part in regional stabilization efforts.

With this change of strategy, Barack Obama has made the Afghanistan war his business; a war that hasn’t received as much focus in the United States as has its big brother, the war in Iraq. Both wars have one thing in common: they’re both terribly unpopular back home.

When Obama’s advisors claim that he has brought about a change in course to a conflict that his predecessor, George W. Bush, neglected, didn’t sufficiently fund and led with no clear goal in mind, they’re overlooking one risk: from here on out, victory or defeat in the Hindu Kush will no longer be associated just with the name Bush, Obama will share the spotlight with him.

The new president seeks to win victory in Afghanistan with weapons, money and flowery rhetoric. The troop surge there is supposed to bring security even to the rural areas and dampen the influence of the insurgents. At the same time, Pakistan is supposed to deny the Taliban safe haven in the border regions.

And Obama wants to use secret negotiations now taking place with so-called Taliban moderates in Riyad to lure away those elements who are currently opposing ISAF troops, but may be less motivated by religious than by financial motives.

As much as these tactics may have been successful in Iraq, it’s a long way from saying they can be successfully transferred over to an ethnically diverse country like Afghanistan with its archaic tribal structure.

America’s new president isn’t just under the pressure to succeed, he’s also under a time limit. American patience with the “Afghanistan Adventure” now in its eighth year has nearly run its course. At the very most, one to two years remain in which Obama has to show real progress there in order to justify the high costs in both money and American lives already expended.

For that reason, during Obama’s visit to Europe next week he will be “encouraging” Europe (and certainly Germany as well) to intensify their engagement in the Hindu Kush. The ISAF partners have long maintained that the halting progress in Afghanistan has been due to America’s half-hearted efforts there as it concentrated on Iraq. But now Washington is focusing on Afghanistan – and Great Britain, France, Germany and others will have to prove to what extent they’re willing to contribute to resolving hostilities there.