McChrystal’s Initiative Will Embarrass Obama

Sometimes you just don’t know what to think. It’s no surprise that a military man like Stanley McChrystal can think of no solution to the Afghanistan problem other than a troop surge. It’s also clear that Secretary of State Clinton and Defense Secretary Gates convinced him to refrain from giving concrete numbers, but the New York Times and Washington Post got them nonetheless from “reliable sources” and immediately published them: there’ll be 42,000 American troops to start. And the allies will also be expected to pony up, i.e., business as usual.

Fortunately, the Obama administration didn’t give an immediate go-ahead as would have happened under George W. Bush. But the reason they gave for the delay is nonetheless bizarre; a new strategy must first be formulated. And what that means also sounds bizarre: unmanned drones will be employed to drive the insurgents, mainly al-Qaeda, into a more limited operational field, thereby reducing their maneuvering space. What does all that mean in good German? Are we seriously supposed to accept that when the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan – and that was in 2001, 8 years ago – they weren’t thinking invade, defeat the enemy, install the government we brought along with us and then flash V for victory signs? No plan B? On what level were they making policy here? On our side, former Defense Minister Peter Struck promised us two to three years maximum and Germany would be out of Afghanistan. That says it all. Naively we assumed that things would be better thought out in the United States. Apparently not so.

But that says a few things about Obama as well. The bottom line is he hasn’t been president for just the last couple of weeks; he’s been in office since January. And the economic and financial crises can’t be blamed because he had already declared the Afghanistan war “the right war” even before his inauguration. Now a government stands there – a government headed by the last best hope in the Kennedy tradition – naked in the middle of the room. If one wanted to be cruel, one might say McChrystal co-opted the German strategy, but that would only be right as an add-on. First the war has to be won, that’s the way military men think. It’s no wonder they get so many haircuts.* But the entire Afghan (or AFPAC, as it’s now called) policy is at a dead-end. The only alternatives are to go all the way down the Vietnam path or get out as soon as possible. It’s going to be a loss of prestige for everyone involved in any case.

* Trans. Note: “Tell it to your hairdresser” is an idiomatic expression in German that indicates that you don’t believe what you’ve been told.