Barack Obama’s Dilemma

It is said of Barack Obama that he is tormented by the question of whether to send a great deal more military support to Afghanistan. Understandable. It is the most important decision that he will have to make not only as a commander in chief, but also as a candidate for reelection in 2012.

Obama is in a similar position to ex-president Lyndon Johnson, who, in 1965, a few months after a triumphant electoral victory, based notably on the “Great Society” theme and on disengaging from Vietnam, finally opted for an “escalation” that was meant to be limited and circumstantial.

We know how that ended. LBJ entered a spiral he couldn’t escape in Vietnam. Three years later, we were still waiting for the “Great Society”, and he finally renounced aspiring to a second mandate.

The generals concerned by the war in Afghanistan, notably David Petraeus and Stanley A. McChrystal, commanders of American forces in the Middle East and in Afghanistan, are asking for 40,000 to 60,000 additional soldiers. NATO is also requesting from its member countries 10,000 to 15,000 additional soldiers for the region of Kandahar alone.

All this to wage a war that admittedly can only be won militarily. The essential problem is to sufficiently secure the country to “win the hearts and minds” and to form an Afghan army and police force able to face the insurrection. That is the “Afghanisation” of the war, which no-one can predict the ending to – an “honorable exit” in case the enemy, meaning the Taliban, win within a decent timeframe, no direct link can be established between that victory and the retreat of the allies. It is a very long-term solution, perhaps too long-term.

Contrarily to LBJ, Obama did not promise to disengage from Afghanistan. Contrarily to Nixon, he doesn’t speak of an “Afghanisation” of the war. Obama speaks, on the contrary, of a “war of necessity” in Afghanistan. As such, he prohibited himself from reducing the number of troops, or even to retreat, more or less unilaterally.

But at the same time, his public opinions prohibit him from answering Generals Petraeus’ and McChrystal’s request, which anyway are far from obtaining a consensus in the Pentagon.

The operation that seems to grant the American president the greatest advantage is in fact to “Pakistanize” the war, because if there must be a military victory or appearances of a military victory, it will happen in Pakistan. It’s there, in the infamous “tribal zones”, that Al-Qaida and the unswerving Taliban who are dictating the Afghan insurrection are hiding. It is believed that the operation is materially less demanding than the “Afghanisation”, and results are expected much sooner.

But it also brings costs and uncertainty. How much can we count on the Pakistani army whose long-awaited great land offensive in those infamous zones never ceases to be imminent?

Amplified air offensives are also mentioned, still in the infamous tribal zones. And if that is not enough, we may need land operations, with or without Pakistan’s consent.

That is more than an “escalation”, it is an implication that the war will be enlarged. Obama’s dilemma is not only similar to LBJ’s, but also comparable to Richard Nixon’s, who, through air offensives, expanded the Vietnam war to neighboring Cambodia in 1969, in the name of disengagement.

In its way, Pakistan is an even more dreadful trap for Obama than Vietnam and Cambodia were for Johnson and Nixon, or even than Afghanistan was for George W. Bush. Barack Obama is also facing an electoral choice.