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December 02, 2009
Obama and Afghanistan
I watched the speech tonight, of course. Like Dick Durbin and other Dems, I need time to think about it. Like Fred Kaplan, I am unsure of what to think.
Garry Wills doesn't need time and doesn't feel conflicted about Obama's choice. Here's his take, published minutes ago on The New York Review of Books' blog, and reproduced in part below.
I suspect Wills' view would have been my father's, as well; I know it is my grandmother's. Why it isn't yet mine is a question that has been fucking me up in a serious way, both tonight and before. Doesn't help that I'm on page 620 of this, shuddering with dread as I read about the hell of 1943 on the D train home from work.
Afghanistan: The Betrayal
I did not think he would lose me so soon - sooner than Bill Clinton did. Like many people, I was deeply invested in the success of our first African-American president. I had written op-ed pieces and articles to support him in The New York Times and The New York Review of Books. My wife and I had maxed out in donations for him. Our children had been ardent for his cause.
Others I respect have given up on him before now. I can see why. His backtracking on the treatment of torture (and photographs of torture), his hesitation to give up on rendition, on detentions, on military commissions, and on signing statements, are disheartening continuations of George W. Bush's heritage. But I kept hoping that he was using these concessions to buy leeway for his most important position, for the ground on which his presidential bid was predicated.
There was only one thing that brought him to the attention of the nation as a future president. It was opposition to the Iraq war. None of his serious rivals for the Democratic nomination had that credential - not Hillary Clinton, not Joseph Biden, not John Edwards. It set him apart. He put in clarion terms the truth about that war - that it was a dumb war, that it went after an enemy where he was not hiding, that it had no indigenous base of support, that it had no sensible goal and no foreseeable cutoff point.
He said that he would not oppose war in general, but dumb wars. On that basis, we went for him. And now he betrays us. Although he talked of a larger commitment to Afghanistan during his campaign, he has now officially adopted his very own war, one with all the disqualifications that he attacked in the Iraq engagement. This war too is a dumb one. It has even less indigenous props than Iraq did.
Iraq at least had a functioning government (though a tyrannical one). The Afghanistan government that replaced the Taliban is not only corrupt but ineffectual. The country is riven by tribal war, Islamic militancy, and warlordism, and fueled by a drug economy - interrupting the drug industry will destabilize what order there is and increase hostility to us.
We have been in Afghanistan for eight years, earning hatred as occupiers, and after this record for longevity in American wars we will be there for still more years earning even more hatred. It gives us not another Iraq but another Vietnam, with wobbly rulers and an alien culture.
Ok. More soon.
Posted by caps at December 2, 2009 01:22 AM