Commitment

The US news media, when reporting on military action abroad, has a tendency to fetishize the Vietnam War. But when comparing the current battle for the human terrain in Afghanistan, a far simpler and more apt comparison comes to mind. Certainly it was in the mind of SecDef Robert Gates, who – as a CIA player in the mujahadeen war against the Soviets – knows a thing or two about the hole in the world map representing by the Af.

Mr. Gates, discussing that period in his 1996 memoir “From the Shadows,” wrote: “The Soviets had to either reinforce or lose. Because they clearly were not winning.” Gen. McChrystal used similar language in his recent warning about possible American “failure” in Afghanistan unless adequate resources are committed. Mr. Gorbachev ended up authorizing a small troop surge; 18 months later, he announced plans for a withdrawal.

The U.S. Army, in a 1989 secret “lessons learned” study of the Soviets’ campaign, said they simply didn’t have enough boots on the ground. “Insufficient forces were available to expand appreciably the area of physical control, or to identify and attack many insurgent targets at the same time,” said the study, now partially declassified. “When major operations were conducted in one part of the country, forces had to be drawn from other areas.”

Mr. Gates’s knowledge of how the Soviet occupation and its brutalities inflamed local anger contributed to his initial skepticism about a U.S. surge. “I worry a great deal about the size of the foreign military footprint in Afghanistan,” he told a Senate hearing in April. “Soviets were in there with 110,000 troops, didn’t care about civilian casualties and couldn’t win…”

“I take seriously Gen. McChrystal’s point that the size of the footprint is [less important than] the nature of the footprint and the behavior of those troops and their attitudes and their interactions with the Afghans,” Mr. Gates said in September after talks with military leaders.

Gen. McChrystal has explicitly addressed concerns about falling into Moscow’s pitfalls. In his August assessment of the war, he quoted Abdul Rahim Wardak, President Hamid Karzai’s defense minister, as telling the U.S.: “Unlike the Russians, who imposed a government with alien ideology, you enabled us to write a democratic constitution and choose our own government. Unlike the Russians, who destroyed our country, you came to rebuild.”

So long as the Afghan people continue to believe that, there’s a decent chance at wresting a least worst outcome from the bearded barbarians of the Taliban. But it will require more than just the deployment of 30-40,000 additional US troops. It will require the fierce engagement of all the power centers in government, politics that stop at the water’s edge and inspirational leadership. Reconstruction dollars need to flow more to the Afghan economy than to forward operating bases. People are going to have to take some risks, here and there. It’s going to take time, and if we’ve got our eyes on the exit then we need to wear dark sunglasses so that no one can see.

It is said that the chicken is a contributor to the bacon and egg breakfast, but the pig is committed.

We need commitment.

Afterthoughts: Writing in the WSJ opinion page, Fred Barnes opines that despite the result of recent national elections, the US remains fundamentally a center-right, conservative country. The president’s difficulties in ramming through health care reform and cap and trade legislation has therefore less to do with his thin executive portfolio nor any diminishment of his personal attractiveness – which remains quite high – and more to do with the fact that most of those Americans who voted for him truly believed he represented some sort of transcendental shift away from Washington’s “politics as usual.”

Mr. Obama misread the meaning of the 2008 election. It wasn’t a mandate for a liberal revolution. His victory was a personal one, not an ideological triumph of liberalism. Yet Mr. Obama, his aides and Democratic leaders in Congress have treated it as a mandate to radically change policy directions in this country. They are pushing forward one liberal initiative after another. As a result, Mr. Obama’s approval rating has dropped along with the popularity of his agenda.

Mr. Obama should have known better. The evidence that America remains a center-right country was right there in the national exit poll on Election Day. When asked about their political beliefs, 34% identified themselves as conservative, 22% as liberal, and a whopping 44% as moderate.

As Mr. Obama has unveiled his policies, the country has tilted more to the right. A Gallup Poll on Oct. 21 found the country to be 40% conservative, 36% moderate, and 20% liberal.

The left’s agenda of income redistribution and encroaching government control over the country’s economic levers are by no means novel and they remain controversial, to say the least. Pocketbook issues still reign, our economic woes are forefront in many minds, and – previous efforts of the kind being contra-indicatory – no one really believes in the power of Wise Government Bureaucrats to save them money through wholesale reformation of huge sectors of the economy.

On the same pages, Peggy Noonan worries that the president’s disdain for (or ignorance of) diplomatic protocol risks iconography:

The Obama bowing pictures are becoming iconic, and they would not be if they weren’t playing off a growing perception. If the pictures had been accompanied by headlines from Asia saying “Tough Talks Yield Big Progress” or “Obama Shows Muscle in China,” the bowing pictures might be understood this way: “He Stoops to Conquer: Canny Obama shows elaborate deference while he subtly, toughly, quietly advances his nation’s interests.”

But that’s not how the pictures were received or will be remembered.

As a candidate, Mr. Obama’s foreign policy stump was that Iraq was a catastrophe that took the nation’s eye off the critical fight in Afghanistan. Many of his supporters no doubt thought that this was a purely tactical play, a way to campaign against a deeply unpopular politician who was in any case not running for re-election.

It would be ironic, would it not, if the president found himself unable to deliver on his liberal wing’s most cherished domestic agenda, but rescued his own presidency through a vigorous and successful of the prosecution of the war in Afghanistan?

He’s got the right people in place in uniform and a strategy that could work. Whatever else you might think about Hillary Clinton, she is a forceful presence at State and may be able to bend the bureaucracy to her will.  And the president is a gifted orator, which is what this fight needs to sustain domestic resolve. No one – or nearly no one – likes the idea of losing wars. They just hate the idea of throwing good  money (and lives) after bad.

He could yet be a great president, if only he could seize the opportunity.