Late yesterday afternoon, news broke that former U.S. Army General and current Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry told the White House twice last week that it would be a mistake to send more troops to Afghanistan before the issues with Hamid Karzai's government are resolved. He also stated that the U.S. commitment to Afghanistan should not be open ended. If this story from the Associated Press is correct, then President Obama is thinking along the same lines, having rejected all the options offered by his national security team because they lack a clarity on "how and when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government."
The lack of "they will greet us as liberators" rhetoric not withstanding, the public debate over Afghanistan has taken place within some very familiar and narrow parameters, focused almost entirely on the question of troop levels and only occasionally on U.S. interests in the region and how they are served -- or not -- by our presence there. This news is likely to accelerate criticism of the president as "dithering," as various factions work to exert even more public pressure on the president to choose the option they prefer.
Frankly, I found this news to be a great relief. There are no points for choosing quickly if the president makes the wrong choice. Obama ran on a platform of not just wanting to end the war in Iraq, but to end the mindset that gets us into "dumb wars" in the first place. Part of ending that mindset is refusing to submit to political pressure to raise troop levels without a coherent plan to end the war. Essentially, Obama is saying exactly what Gen. David Petraeus famously said about Iraq years ago: "Tell me how this ends." It's the kind of thing the president should be thinking about.
-- A. Serwer
