Quagmire!
That didn’t take long. NYT dusts off quagmire theme for Obama’s Afghan War, complete with quaint 2001-like Kipling citation:
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains
And the women come out to cut up what remains
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
—Rudyard Kipling, “The Young British Soldier,” 1892WASHINGTON — Can President Obama succeed in that long-lamented “graveyard of empires” — a place that has crushed foreign occupiers for more than 2,000 years?
Ever since the Bush administration diverted its attention — and resources — to the war in Iraq from the war in Afghanistan, military planners and foreign policy experts have bemoaned the dearth of troops to keep that country from sliding back into Taliban control. And in that time, the insurgency blossomed, as Taliban militants took advantage of huge swaths of territory, particularly in the south, that NATO troops weren’t able to fill.
(Quick fact check. When the United States invaded Iraq, Aghanistan was quiet. The vast majority of the 100,000-odd troops involved in the Iraq invasion could not have been diverted from Afghanistan … they had never been anywhere near the place. Also, NATO countries theoretically are more than capable of filling the huge swaths of territory. They just don’t want to.)
Enter Mr. Obama. During the campaign he promised to send two additional brigades — 7,000 troops — to Afghanistan. During the transition, military planners started talking about adding as many as 30,000 troops. And within days of taking office, Mr. Obama announced the appointment of Richard Holbrooke, architect of the Balkan peace accords, to execute a new Afghanistan policy.
But even as Mr. Obama’s military planners prepare for the first wave of the new Afghanistan “surge,” there is growing debate, including among those who agree with the plan to send more troops, about whether — or how — the troops can accomplish their mission, and just what the mission is.
… Some foreign policy experts argue that Mr. Obama’s decision to send additional troops to Afghanistan is simply an extension of Bush administration policy in the region, with the difference being that Mr. Obama could be putting more American lives at risk to pursue a failed policy.
OK, who’s debating that? Discredited Bush admin turncoat Colin Powell, known for disliking wars that last more than six months and involve actually taking casualties; purported Afghan expert Karin von Hippel, who thinks Afghanistan needs to be swamped with hundreds of thousands of troops, but whose UN and EU nation-building experience you’d think would have informed her that waiting around for Europe to help out is a waste of time; and American imperialism-decrying BU Prof Andrew Bacevich, a conventional warfare fan who dislikes the US military’s expansion of counterinsurgency capabilities it needs to fight wars in places like Afghanistan. Also, J. Alexander Thier at the US Institute of Peace, who says troops are fine but you need to reform the government.
None of whom, at last check, are actually involved in any of this strategizing or decision-making. This astonishingly uninformative article, while taking a couple of swipes at Bush policies, fails to mention Bush’s counterinsurgency success in Iraq; the fact that its architect, Gen. David Petraeus, is now in charge of Afghanistan; or anything else that is happening in Afghanistan or in reference to Afghanistan aside from the appointment of Richard Holbrooke and the plans to boost troop numbers there. Colin Powell and Andrew Bacevich are largely beyond hope and cannot be expected to be very helpful. But von Hippel, Thier, NYT scribbler Helene Cooper and her readers may be pleased to learn that US military and government officials are in fact working on difficult issues such as Afghan government corruption, addressing the needs of the Afghan countryside, raising the military presence in key areas, the expanding Afghan military and enlisting locals against the Taliban, who are not particularly popular due to murderous tactics and have indictaed their own interest in a negotiated settlement.
The real question raised by this article is why a major American newspaper … currently bogged down in a considerable quagmire of its own … would want to jump into the quagmire of quagmirism again. But it looks like we may be witnessing a fascinating evolution in which Obama, having adopted a number of key Bush war policies and practices, will be subjected to the same shoddy reporting practices.
(A quick look at recent quagmire journalism: Afghanistan was widely proclaimed to be a quagmire even as the Taliban was throwing down its weapons and bolting in late 2001. It was largely quiet for five or six years, and the dread Taliban’s return over the last couple of years has been marked by extremely low coalition casualty rates and extremely high Taliban casualty rates. US forces bearing down on Baghdad in 2003 also were quickly quagmired, when a sandstorm shut operations down for a couple of days. Then, there was the terrible period of the insurgency, several years in which the United States military sought a new footing, adapting to an evolving war. Though not characterized as such by quagmire enthusiasts, on Capitol Hill anti-war pols quickly found themselves bogged down in a quagmire of pointless resolutions and failed efforts to undercut the president and US troops in the field. One of the least bloody wars in American history to date was rendered subsequently less bloody by the remarkable turnaround known as the surge, which demonstrated that even the hated Yanqui imperialist military-industrial is capable of mounting a successful counterinsurgency.)
Topics: Afghanistan, Bush, Obama, military
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:48 am on Sunday, January 25, 2009
6 Responses to “Quagmire!”
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January 25th, 2009 at 10:38 am
One wonders how the New York Times would have covered the 7 year long American Revolution. Quagmire? Freedom Fighters?
How about the NYT as Quisling?
January 25th, 2009 at 10:44 am
Thank you for setting the record straight day in and day out, Jules. It would be a lot more disheartening to read this drivel without your stalwart commentary.
Tip jar, people. And send the link around.
January 25th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Afghanistan was the designated quagmire until Iraq pushed it aside. Now that the Iraq war is won, it’s become the cool new quagmire all over again.
January 25th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
Well, the media elites couldn’t force the loss of the Iraq war, so now they’re working to lose the war in Afghanistan. I only hope Obama doesn’t roll over for them.
January 26th, 2009 at 11:19 am
Waiting for the EU panty-waists?
Yeah, good luck with that.
January 26th, 2009 at 7:03 pm
The NYT, laboring under the delusion that because Obama is President, it is somehow still relevant, is signaling the Administration that it’s time to abandon Afghanistan because that’s what the US does under Democrat leadership. I doubt that will happen because Obama, despite his rhetoric, seems to get the GWOT thing.