Barack Obama, Stanley McChrystal and dithering in Afghanistan

That’s the subject of this week’s Scripps Howard column with Ben Boychuk. You’ll probably not be surprised that I’m suggesting it’s time to ratchet down our endless war against the Taliban. You might be surprised to find out my conservative colleague seemingly agrees. He writes:

Trying to pacify the ungovernable Afghan countryside or win the support of people who are nothing if not xenophobic is a waste of time, money and precious American lives. If the goal is to secure Americans at home, we’re unlikely to accomplish it on the present course.

Point-counterpoint columns are probably less entertaining when the point and the counterpoint make the same point. But still. My take:

In his memo to President Obama, Gen. Stanley McChrystal suggested that even if America does everything right, it might still lose the war. Why? Because victory depends on having a stable, corruption-lite ― nobody expects corruption-free ― Afghan government that meets the needs of its people. Afghan President Hamid Karzai cannot provide that government, which means America cannot win. More troops won’t change that.

There have been other signs that after eight years, Afghanistan is a quagmire. We’ve now been in that country about the same amount of time as the Soviet Union was during its doomed war in the 1980s. Karzai’s brother ― long known to be dealing in the drugs that finance Taliban operations in that country ― was this week revealed to be on the CIA payroll. And an American Foreign Service officer resigned after concluding that the presence of U.S. and NATO troops has fueled the insurgency. We’re still there because they’re fighting us; they’re fighting us because we’re still there. It’s a complete mess.

And it is a mess that was mostly achieved under President George W. Bush, who let his attention wander ― disastrously ― to Iraq. Dick Cheney’s recent criticism of President Obama’s “dithering” on Afghanistan policy is thus remarkable. Having screwed it up so badly, you would think the former vice president would have the good sense and grace to simply shut up. But political bickering won’t solve Afghanistan. Probably nothing can.

America originally invaded Afghanistan because al- Qaida, which attacked us on 9/11, was headquartered there. But fighting an endless war against the Taliban is not doing much, if anything, to make Americans safer from terrorism. It might be making things worse. Time to try something new.

The Afghanistan debate

Just to be clear, right now the choice isn’t between adding more troops or bringing them all home. It’s between adding more troops or refocusing the mission that the existing troops have.

The White House also tried to make it clear on Monday that Mr. Obama did not envision actually pulling out of Afghanistan no matter how he rules on General McChrystal’s request. “I don’t think we have the option to leave,” said Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary.

Even the option advocated by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. for a scaled-back approach would not reduce the current force of 68,000 troops, officials said. Instead, it would keep troop levels roughly where they are now but shift emphasis to the sort of Predator drone strikes and Special Forces operations that have been used more aggressively over the last year.

For what it’s worth.

The New Black Panthers are just like the Taliban

I don’t think I can say often enough that the New Black Panthers who briefly stood menacingly outside a Fairmount polling station last November acted like a couple of knuckleheads. But we also know their presence there was brief, and I still haven’t heard evidence that anybody was kept from voting.

Still, the folks who kinda want you to believe Obama is president because of a Black Power conspiracy are still hard at work, keeping the issue alive. Hans A. von Spakovsky does it again, equating two or three Black Panthers with the whole of the Taliban.

The anti-reformists (the Taliban) have been engaging in violence and threats of violence in the lead up to today’s elections in Afghanistan. They may want to consider hiring the New Black Panther Party to implement their version of a “ballot security program” at the polls. After all, the NBPP is very experienced in the type of voter intimidation that the Taliban are trying to carry out. Best of all from the Taliban’s point of view, since the U.S. is responsible for security in Afghanistan at the polling places, Eric Holder and the Justice Department have already reviewed and approved the type of voter intimidation that the NBPP is so skilled in carrying out. No matter what they do at the polls, the NBPP can use their DOJ “get out of jail free” card with the Pentagon.

Riiiight.

You’ve got to remember, von Spakovsky is mostly notorious for a government tenure in which he chose to enforce election laws in such a manner as to keep African Americans and other Democratic constituencies from getting to the polls. It’s ok to lock people out of the voting process, apparently, if you’re using the power of the government to do it — and not just freelancing like the Panthers.

Those who fail to learn from history, etc. etc.

From today’s Daily Beast:

The United States originally armed the Taliban when it fought against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Today, though we may now be its enemy, the Taliban still has a way of getting its hands on our weapons, apparently: After discovering that the weapons on 17 or 30 insurgent corpses in Afghanistan were identical to weapons the U.S. had provided to the Afghan government, The New York Times reports that it is likely “that munitions procured by the Pentagon have leaked from Afghan forces for use against American troops.” The United States has failed to account for thousands of rifles issued to Afghan Security forces. “With only spotty American and Afghan controls on the vast inventory of weapons and ammunition sent into Afghanistan during an eight-year conflict, poor discipline and outright corruption among Afghan forces may have helped insurgents stay supplied.”

From NPR, 2006:

The U.S. military can’t account for thousands of weapons purchased to arm some 325,500 Iraqi security forces by December, according to a new report. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last week that the U.S. military would beef up Iraqi forces’ training. But the new data reveals weaknesses in the arming of Iraqi security forces.

Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction who provided the report to Sen. John Warner, says the Iraqi security forces lack the logistics personnel they need, including mechanics, supply clerks and medics.

And, he says, only a small percentage of the Iraqi weapons paid for by U.S. taxpayers are registered by their serial numbers. That means they could easily end up in the hands of insurgents.

My copy of Neil Sheehan’s “A Bright Shining Lie,” an indispensible history of the Vietnam War, is lost in my storage closet somewhere. But I recall from it that a major problem created by the U.S. during that war was that it flooded South Vietnam with small arms to be used against the Vietcong — but through corruption, capture and other means, the Vietcong came to possess many of those weapons for use against the U.S. and its South Vietnamese allies. The United States has a long history of inadvertently arming the people who are trying to kill our soldiers. Seems like somebody would try to figure out how to make that stop.

Pissing off the right people

There’s a phenomenon in politics known as “pissing off the right people.” It’s when a politician takes a controversial stance and his usual allies — having little else to say about that stance — note that critics are getting lathered up about it and figure the stance must be OK.

You see a corollary of this phenomenon in this Weekly Standard blog posting today, noting that the Taliban are praising President Obama’s decision to close down Gitmo. There’s no commentary, but the implication is clear: Obama did something that made the Taliban happy, so it must be wrong.

All I can say is that Gen. David Petraeus — hero to conservatives everywhere — might disagree with that.