A recount, and rethinking, in Afghanistan
Hamid Karzai, then the great hope for Afghan democracy, addresses Congress in 2004. (White House Photo)
Last week, Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., took a long walk with Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai in the gardens of the presidential palace in Kabul. At the end of their Tuesday stroll, Mr. Karzai grudgingly agreed to a run-off election to settle the vote-fraud controversy over his Aug. 20 re-election to office.
Whether Mr. Kerry was carrying a threat from President Barack Obama, or whether Mr. Karzai simply caved in after four days and 20 hours of conversations with Mr. Kerry is not known. But the decision was the correct one.
It was correct for the Afghan people, who deserve to know that the fledgling democracy for which they’ve suffered and bled is legitimate. Correct for the world community, which, over the last eight years, has invested many lives and much time and treasure in Afghanistan. And correct for America, which must decide how much more grief, money and time it wants to spend on Afghanistan.
If Mr. Karzai had insisted his reelection was legitimate, it would have made life simpler for Mr. Obama. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, has said the mission there could take as many as 80,000 more troops deployed not so much as warriors, but as civil-affairs troops. Their job of nation-building could take as long as a decade.
But Gen. McChrystal predicated his request on legitimizing an Afghan government widely viewed outside of Kabul as corrupt. No number of forces can succeed without that, he said. Whoever wins the run-off election on Nov. 7 — Mr. Karzai or former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah — must agree to conform.
Corruption is so deeply entrenched that even a clean election might be impossible. Voter registries are full of fraudulent cards. Voters are cynical and scared; in southern provinces, Taliban insurgents will make it dangerous to get to the polls.
Mr. Obama is getting a lot of uninformed advice. Last week, former Vice President Dick Cheney proved he knows as much as Afghanistan as he did about Iraq (“we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators”), accusing Mr. Obama of “dithering” over the decision. Too many people continue to believe the neo-conservative nonsense that U.S. military might can triumph regardless of cultural and historical impediments and the vagaries of asymmetrical warfare.
Here’s a number worth some attention: $400. That’s what the Pentagon says is the “fully burdened cost” of each gallon of fuel it uses in Afghanistan. The mountainous terrain, absence of pipelines and seaports and insurgent attacks on convoys mean that much of the fuel must be transported by air.
That’s part of why it costs $1 billion to deploy every 1,000 troops to Afghanistan. That’s a million bucks per soldier or marine. It makes the math easy: 30,000 more troops, 30 billion more dollars.
The Marines say they use 800,000 gallons of fuel every day in Afghanistan. Currently, only 10,600 Marines are among the 67,000 U.S. troops in country. You can do the math.
It adds up to a mess. Maybe Afghanistan is worth it as a bulwark against terrorism. Maybe we owe the Afghanis something after eight years. We can’t abandon our international role. But Americans must understand it would be a long, hard, dangerous and extraordinarily expensive mission with no guarantees. It almost makes you wish Mr. Kerry had stayed out of the garden.
The President is examining evidence in order to reach a sound decision based upon education. The President is a lawyer with a Havard degree. Dick Cheney be littles his former office with his attempts to pressure the President. Good policy is formulated without undue pressure from agitators. Sound decisions are made by sober minds not those influenced by agitation. The President is doing well insulating himself from outside agitation by a minority party former officeholder. The minority party is attempting to dictate policy via a general who is serving with the President who just so happens to be the Commander-in-Chief. The President has a constitutional duty to make his own Command decisions including replacing generals who attempt to use minority party politics to pressure a majority party officeholder i.e. the President. As all soldiers know it is Congresses Army and the President is the Commander-in-Chief. If Mr. Cheney had performed any military duty he would know this without question. Since Mr. Cheney was to good for the Army he should stop trying to command it. The President is our country’s number one soldier not Dick Cheney.
Odd that the editorial fails to mention that in March President Obama announced a new Afgan strategy, along with a new guy to run the show - McChrystal. It would have also been worthwhile for context to reference President Obama’s prior statements about the priority of the Afgan war. Just wondering why’d that stuff get left out?
14 US servicemen died in recent helicopter accidents.
Is it appropriate for the President to be conspicuously spending time on a golf course?
“CBS’ Mark Knoller — an unofficial documentarian and statistician of all things White House-related — wrote on his Twitter feed that, “Today - Obama ties Pres. Bush in the number of rounds of golf played in office: 24.
Took Bush 2 yrs & 10 months.”"
http://twitter.com/markknoller/status/5154321964
We didn’t have the cash for either war when we started them and we have less to spend now. Our Harvard educated President doesn’t have the guts to pull us out much like the gutless legislative class of 2006 led by Pelosi and Reid. They were swept into power running an anti Bush/War campaign but could not force the issue when push came to shove. Some of the mess our ivy league President is so diligently trying to mop up was spilled while he was in the Senate.
Wouldn’t you like to hear our President steal a line from Missouri’s own Harry Truman and follow it up by actually doing something regardless of the political consequences?
Obama is stuck between a rock and a hard spot. When Bush was in office all the libs denounced the Iraq war and said that Afg is the war we should be engaged in. Well, now that Bush is gone they want out of Afg. What changed? Fact is the libs don’t think any war is worth fighting. They forgot all about 3000 deaths in New York. To appease the left, Obama would have to withdraw from Afg but since he said all along that we should be there he can’t really do that. Hence the stalling to make a decision on Afg. He is more worried about his poll numbers and the far left than he is his troops. As a Commander in Chief he is a joke.
Solutions to this George Bush legacy aren’t clear cut or simple. Karsai was ‘their man.’ He was presented to us as a beacon for democracy and reform. Before the present administration, we were kept in the dark about his regime’s ineptness and corruption. The entire region (Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India) is a hornet’s nest of inter-related dilemmas that our previous leadership ignored. You may have noticed from recent news reports that circumstances have changed since this past spring.
Pakistan and its nuclear arsenal are vulnerable to Taliban takeover. The movement originated in Pakistani madrasahs. The Security service of Pakistan’s Army encouraged their control over Afghanistan’s chaos. Some pundits claim that Pakistan can help clear up this mess. Because of historic conflicts over Kashmir, most of their military resources protect the border with India. They refused to acknowledge that the Taliban presented a national threat until recently when some Taliban/Al Qaeda, as we predicted, moved to invade Islamabad. So, while our troops are in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s army is battling Taliban encroachment and there are intensive diplomatic efforts to ease Pakistani-Indian tension.
We rarely ever hear about the works of the NGO’s and NATO allies (clinics, schools, humanitarian aid to internal refugees, etc.). The ‘boys’ like to show off their ‘toys’ so we’re mostly getting the military perspectives. I watched a CNN Correspondent say that Iraq was ten times worse but by the end of the same segment describe the situation as horrible. Perhaps perception depends on when and where you turn on your TV.
Give the Afghani people credit for knowing the difference between invasion, conquest and temporary occupation. They’re wary of being abandoned to sociopaths and thugs again. According to the reports I’ve read, they’re not the source of attacks on us. Our adversaries are a relatively small but skilled group who want to regain power.