Afghanistan: When On Earth Will Obama Make a Decision?

By Iain Martin

On May 27 1964, President Johnson confided in an aide on a subject that was already starting to become a preoccupation. “The more I stayed awake last night thinking about this thing, the more… It looks like to me we’re gettin’ in to another Korea,” Robert Dallek quotes Johnson saying in Flawed Giant. “And I don’t think it’s worth fighting for and I don’t think we can get out. And it’s just the biggest damn mess… What in the hell is Vietnam worth to me… What is it worth to this country?”
Johnson’s agonies over Vietnam were to get much worse. At that point he had yet to commit U.S. ground troops and when he did the resulting war overshadowed his next four years in power. It is said that it is Johnson’s fate that the current President seeks to avoid in Afghanistan, as though this is an adequate explanation of why he is declining to make a clear call about the next stage of the war.
Again, last night, a decision on what to do was put off by Obama. The shape of a possible surge will now not be decided for another few weeks - after Thanksgiving, we are told. Foreign leaders had expected news of American plans after the widely trailed war council in Washington on Wednesday.
Gordon Brown even let slip in the House of Commons that Britain thought it would hear in the next few days. What is causing the delay? It looks suspiciously like presidential prevarication. But Afghanistan is not Vietnam; they are not the same.
Johnson inherited a pledge to prop up a south east Asian government from communist aggression and his predecessor had sent mainly military advisors and aid. Obama inherits a war with 68,000 Americans already on the ground, and other NATO troops alongside. It has been running since 2001, for two years longer than the second world war. The 2003 NATO deployment is now six years old.
Johnson, in contrast, was confronted by a multi-dimensional threat in a war which the U.S. had not yet joined properly. There was Communist China to concern him and a Soviet Russia looking for signs of weakness which it could then exploit in other parts of the world.
Obama’s challenge is different - not easy, but not as complicated either. The unstable region is home to a terrorist threat which threatens western security. How is that best confronted? As I blogged recently, he has several choices.
If he thinks the war can be won conventionally then McChrystal’s plan for 40,000 more troops (modelled on the successful Iraq surge) looks like the way to go. If he thinks it can’t be won like this, then he can start to scale back, abandon the illusion of a democratic Afghanistan, choose which tribes to back with special forces and air power support and end the NATO mission as currently constituted.
But time is getting on. He has been President for 10 months now and still the world waits. What will eventually emerge? The semi-surge of 30,000 troops with full deployment not for at least a year looks like his favoured option. Or at least it did when it seemed he was going to make a long overdue decision. Now? Who knows?
The danger is that this drift erodes allied confidence and strengthens the hand of those who want America and Britain defeated in Afghanistan. Enemies such as the Taliban are able to smell weakness, and so are America’s allies. In Britain the war effort is misfiring, as the public grows disenchanted over casualties. A strong lead from the U.S. might still change the situation, but one starts to doubt it after this latest delay.
As Obama continues to ponder what next, it may well be that he is so worried about being the next LBJ that he forgets the record of another Democrat president. One who could not grasp why being seen as weak abroad leads to so many problems. Who didn’t understand how to respond to aggression and made poor diplomatic decisions. Perhaps it’s not Johnson he should be worried about being compared to, but Jimmy Carter.