Obama on Afghanistan --- too little too late?

Friend --

If you missed it last night, you should take a few minutes to watch President Obama's address to the nation about our policy in Afghanistan:



http://my.barackobama.com/Afghanistan

The President's address marks a major turning point in a nearly decade-long conflict. He announced his plan to start withdrawing our troops from Afghanistan next month, fulfilling a promise he made a year and a half ago to begin the drawdown this summer.

To put it simply: when this president took office, there were 180,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, the combat mission in Iraq has ended, Afghanistan will be fully responsible for its own security by 2014, and there will be fewer than 100,000 American troops in the two countries by the end of this year.

As President Obama decisively concludes two long-running wars, he is refocusing our foreign policy to more effectively address the threats we face and strengthen America's leadership in the world as we do.

I'm writing to you because this transformation has already begun to reshape the policy debate -- foreign and domestic -- in the 2012 election. As the President said last night: "It is time to focus on nation building here at home."

The outcome of this debate will have consequences for all of us, so it's important that you understand the policy and help inform the conversation.

You can read the President's remarks below, or watch the address on the White House website here:

http://my.barackobama.com/Afghanistan

Thanks,

Messina

Jim Messina
Campaign Manager
Obama for America
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AFGHANISTAN: HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF
James Ottavio Castagnera
Sep. 30, 2009
The generals are demanding more troops and the president appears prepared to oblige. For a sixty-something American male, this sounds ominously like Vietnam, Westmoreland, and LBJ. For historians versed in Afghanistan’s bloody modern history, the echoes sound louder and deeper.

Britain fought three Afghan wars in the 19th and early 20th centuries, all aimed primarily at halting hostile expansions southward toward Imperial India.

The first Anglo-Afghan War (1839-1842) was highlighted by the massacre of a British army. Occupying Kabul, but surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered, 4500 military personnel and some 12,000 camp followers departed the city under a supposed promise of safe passage on January 1, 1842. Struggling through a frozen landscape and constantly harassed by hostile tribesmen, the entire contingent was either wiped out or enslaved with the sole exception of Dr. William Brydon, an assistant surgeon of the British East India Company.

The Brits rallied its forces, replaced incompetent commanders and returned to Afghanistan, cutting a swath of destruction all the way back to Kabul. They then, wisely returned home to India. In the succeeding years the Russian creep toward the gem in Victoria’s crown continued largely unabated by Britain’s Afghan efforts.

The Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-80) was precipitated by the arrival of Russian envoys in Kabul. When a British demand for similar diplomatic recognition went unanswered, the Brits again sent occupying forces into Afghanistan. With the empire’s troops occupying most key locations in the country, the Afghan ruler was forced to sign a treaty. However, on September 3, 1879, the British diplomatic resident in Kabul was assassinated. Back trudged the troops over the high passes, occupying Kabul yet again and forcing the abdication of the Afghan ruler. Although this had the appearance of a victory, arguably wiping away the humiliations of 1842, the Brits realized that holding the city did nothing to control the hostile tribes outside its walls.

In 1880, the British government changed and the incumbent Liberals abandoned the so-called Forward Policy. Britain once again left Afghans to their own devices. Meanwhile, an estimated 2500 British and colonial troops and some 1500 Afghan fighters had died in this second confrontation.

The Third Anglo-Afghan War lasted a mere three months, commencing in May 1919 and ending in an armistice on August 8th. The brief clash was precipitated by an Afghan incursion into British territory. This was repulsed but the two forces fought to a standstill. Some Afghan cities, including Kabul, were bombed. The Afghan army pulled back and the armistice was signed. No clear winner emerged from the brief struggle, but British territory was cleared of Afghan troops. Thus, for all practical purposes, ended British military adventures in Afghanistan. Three armed conflicts across 80 years resulted in nothing more than the maintenance of a fragile status quo on the empire’s northwestern frontier.

Fast forward to 1979. Deployment of the late-great Soviet Union’s 40th Army into Afghanistan on Christmas Eve began the nine-year agony that finally ended with a Russian withdrawal commencing on May 15, 1988. Anyone who has read George Crile’s splendid book, Charlie Wilson’s War (2003), knows that the CIA played an important role in enabling the Afghan freedom fighters to bring down Soviet helicopters as a rate that emasculated the Russians of battlefield mobility and left their armor and other superior ordinance to the tender mercies of the mujahideen. Chopper losses totaled 333, along with another 118 aircraft of various types downed. Tank casualties totaled 147. The Soviet Union admitted to the loss of 13,836 troops. Other observers place the figure closer to 14,500. More than 600,000 Russian troops served in Afghanistan (though no more than 100,000 at any given time), during this doomed adventure.

Concludes Crile, “The story of (Congressman) Charlie Wilson and the CIA’s secret war in Afghanistan is an important, missing chapter of our recent past…. [T]he terrible truth is that the group of sleeping lions that the United States aroused may well have inspired an entire generation of militant young Muslims to believe that the moment is theirs.”

And, now, here we are, entering our ninth year in Afghanistan, having launched Operation Enduring Freedom on October 7, 2001. And our commanders are singing the same old song sung by William Westmoreland in the sixties: just give me more troops and I’ll bring home a victory.

We all know George Santayana’s famous statement: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Sad to say, while we all give that pearl of wisdom frequent lip service, we cannot seem to follow it, once the boots are on the ground.

(Jim Castagnera is a university attorney and author of Al Qaeda Goes to College [Praeger 2009].)

**********************************************************************************************Jim Castagnera: How Do You Like the 21st Century So Far?

SOURCE: Carbon County (PA) Times-News (11-15-08)

[Jim Castagnera's 17th book, “Al Qaeda Goes to College,” will be published by Greenwood/Praeger next spring.]

On Tuesday, November 4th, we Americans made history. As Journalist Bill Moyers pointed out on NPR, the albatross of racism has been lifted from around many American necks. I include myself in this category. I also feel as if the 2008 national election is the first bright spot in a dismal decade.

The new century was hardly underway when the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks bloodily and dramatically signaled the end of America’s brief illusion that, as the world’s sole superpower at the end of the Cold War, Uncle Sam could do anything he liked and get away with it.

A strong case can be made that we over-reacted to the Nine/Eleven attacks. Launching a two-front war from which we have been unable to extricate ourselves is deemed by many Americans to have been a colossal blunder. If you believe that fighting terrorism is essentially police work, and that our military forces are creating more radical Islamists than they are killing, then the Afghan and Iraqi wars were a bad idea. If, on the other hand, you believe that America needs a stable Middle East to secure vital oil supplies, then the Bush Administration’s gross underestimate of the price in lives in treasure required to pacify the region makes the Afghan and Iraqi wars a bad idea.

More troubling to me is the financial crisis precipitated by Wall Street’s greed and Washington’s unwillingness to regulate the financial world’s shenanigans. As Moyers said the other night on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” since the Bush people have no respect for federal regulation of business, they saw no reason to dampen the redistribution of wealth to the financial/power elite that occurred over the past eight years. The Bush tax cuts contributed mightily to this largesse for the elite. The War on Terror also contributed mightily. For example, Halliburton, which made Dick Cheney a multi-multi-millionaire between Bush I and Bush II, has been rewarded with billions in defense contracts since the start of hostilities. What the tax cuts and war didn’t put in the top five-percent’s pockets, they stole.

I don’t know what kind of a president Obama will make. Two years ago I wrote him off as a flash in the pan. A year ago I criticized his lack of national-service experience. As Senator Joe Lieberman said at the Republican National Convention last summer, Obama is a talented man of great potential. But, as Lieberman added, the ability to make an inspiring speech is no substitute for experience.

That being said, his themes of “hope” and “Yes, we can” are sorely needed now. He seems to be surrounding himself with the wealth of experience he himself lacks, starting with Joe Biden. By the time this column appears, he most likely will have picked a Treasury Secretary of comparable stature. Jack Kennedy was younger, when elected, than Obama is now. JFK was tested and made some early blunders at his first summit with the Soviet Union’s leader and at the Bay of Pigs. But by October 1962 he was sufficiently seasoned to surmount the Cuban Missile Crisis. Obama, too, is a quick study and a gutsy guy.

Even if he turns out to be a mediocre president, his election by a wide majority marks a departure from America’s centuries of racism. It validates and renews Jefferson’s claim that America is the last, best hope of the world. It supports our claim that our greatest strength is our diversity.

The challenges facing President Obama and the rest of us are daunting. The current financial crisis will subside. The challenge of a global marketplace occupied by an ascendant China, a resurgent Russia, and other energetic and powerful economic competitors is with us for good. Islamic militants probably won’t quit until they succeed in detonating a nuclear device on US soil, or we succeed in killing them, while also making peace with the moderate majority of the Muslim world. We who work in education must somehow manage to increase the demoralizing high school graduation rates of our largest cities, while providing our college students with all the skills they need to compete in a world where young Americans are no longer guaranteed to do better than their parents.

The half century that has comprised most of this writer’s life, from the late 1940s down to the turn of the new century, was a sort of Golden Age in the USA. Getting by was a piece of cake. Relative affluence was possible for the vast majority. The Cold War with its doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction created a sort of “Pax Atomica” interrupted relatively rarely by low-level conflicts in Asia and elsewhere. Ronald Reagan was the last US president to know what was wanted: “Here's my strategy on the Cold War: We win, they lose.”

Since 1988, our brief ascendancy to sole superpower-ship has plunged into confusion, greed, and blind stupidity. I don’t know if President Obama is the man to reverse this trajectory. But unless you think that the first eight years of the new millennium were good times, you need to join those of us who hope.