The Black Hole of Kabul

With the bitter certainty of displeasing everyone, hawks and doves, the right and the left parties, generals and ambassadors, Obama took the only decision that the Afghan mess inherited by Bush allowed him to take, to wit going deeper into the Afghan wasp nest.

In a classic case of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” Obama knew, while talking yesterday to the future officials who will have to lead the soldiers in a land where empire has failed since the days of Alexander the Macedonian, that every decision he would announce would be criticized and controversial, and that this could become his Vietnam: the mire where his presidency, together with the likes of hundreds of American and European soldiers and thousands of Afghans, could be swallowed, as was Lyndon Johnson’s in the 1960s. Between the accusations of wavering leveled by the Republicans, who would have accused him of superficiality if he had made up his mind quickly, or of defeatism if he had reduced the forces, and those of betrayal leveled by the Democratic base that dreams of an end of Bush’s wars, he had no choice. Breaking camp and leaving “the mayor of Kabul” (as Amid Karzai, who knows how to win the elections, but not how to govern, is sarcastically called) to his own fate would have labeled Obama as “the new Carter,” someone who doesn’t have the guts to face threats. Increasing the number of troops from 48,000 to 100,000, and the number of NATO soldiers by more than 40,000, is disillusioning to those who elected him as means of dropping, not dragging, the cart left by Bush.

In other nations, and political cultures, Barack Obama’s justification for this new military escalation would be obvious. It would be enough to put the objective responsibility of fixing the mistakes of his predecessor, who deployed all troops to Iraq, which wasn’t a threat to the American security, while neglecting the Taliban and Al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

But in the United States, blaming your predecessor wins elections, but does not protect yourself. Whoever is in command wanted the full responsibility of the position he has assumed, and must take it, even if the vehicle he took over was ramshackle. What Obama’s supporters and those who enthusiastically voted for him regret is that the historical exception that is this man is getting stuck in the mud of the implacable normality of the times, and the brilliance of his promises is fading under the difficulty of the choices he must make. The President is so well aware that he set a three-year deadline for the end of the war in Afghanistan, exactly the amount of time he has until November 2012, when the presidential election will take place. He knows that new escalations without a clear goal of victory and an exit strategy (like Johnson’s scheme that increased the number of soldiers in Vietnam from 10,000 to half a million) would sentence him, like Johnson and Carter, to a one-term presidency. Yesterday, Bush’s wars became Obama’s.