Peter Beinart analyzes President Obama's foreign policy and comes to the conclusion that he is the second coming of Dick Nixon. It makes sense: Like Nixon, Obama rejects a monolithic view of America's enemies and tries to understand the limits of American power. But while Beinart's comparisons work on the diplomatic stage of Iran and China, I lose him when he gets into Afghanistan:For eight years, the Bush Administration lumped al-Qaeda and the Taliban together. It was the most obvious application of Bush's famous declaration that "we will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them." But now the Obama Administration is making exactly that distinction. "There is clearly a difference between" the Taliban and al-Qaeda, press secretary Robert Gibbs said recently. A host of Obama officials have insisted that the Taliban is a tribal and national movement and that while it may want to terrorize Afghan secularists and women, it is not particularly interested in terrorizing the American homeland.If that is the Obama administration's analysis, you may ask, why are we sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban? Beinart dismisses the move as tactics -- "Despite his decision ... Obama has abandoned the goal of making the country Taliban-free." As we learned over the weekend, the surge in forces is designed to create just enough breathing room to co-opt some Taliban groups and leave the Afghan government in a position to hold its own. That's certainly not the worst strategy in the world for securing Afghanistan, but it doesn't display an understanding of a difference between the international terrorists who attacked the U.S. on 9/11 and Taliban insurgency in that country, given that there is some reason to believe that the Taliban and al Qaeda aren't on the best of terms. The disconnect between the administration's broader foreign policy vision and what they're actually doing in Afghanistan is disconcerting -- look for a longer piece on the topic in the next issue of the Prospect.
-- Tim Fernholz
