*sigh*

[novapsyche]

To me, it seemed Obama fully assumed Bush's mantle last night.

Edit: I say this because of some of the phrases he used and concepts he advanced as the thrust of his message. I suppose it was inevitable that he would invoke 9/11, but some of his phrasing directly mirrors what Bush would have said (and did say) in order to influence public opinion about his war actions.

A fiscal conservative might highlight that we simply don't have the money to finance more troops in Afghanistan, a point with which I wholeheartedly agree. But besides the horrible shape of our economy--drained in large part due to costs for eight years of war at more than $1,000,000,000 a week--is the fact that any major foreign policy concerns necessarily dwarfs domestic policy, which is direly needed. The United States languished under Bush.

I understand that withdrawal from Afghanistan may directly lead to a failed state. However, I don't see that an injection of 30,000 troops (not nearly enough to secure the nation) changes that fate except in terms of chronology.

Comments

[blue-thundering.livejournal.com]

I've been studying post-conflict reconstruction and state-building this term with a professor directly involved in various government and NGO projects in Haiti, Sudan, Somalia, and Afghanistan. At present, three out of four roads out of Kandahar are in insurgency hands. I know the American public has rallied around the notion of "bring our troops home!" but the only outcome of such an action at present is the creation, overnight, of a failed state. And while another common American cry is "Great! Let it fail!" the failed state of Afghanistan would create huge pressures both for Pakistan (directly, as their shared border also means shared insurgency lines, meaning a direct increase of terrorist activity across both states) and the global community.

If the comparison helps, Haiti's present level of infrastructure is worlds above Afghanistan's, in large part because when the Afghanistan reconstruction mission began, demilitarization and security sector reform tasks were absurdly partitioned down lines of ownership (for police, for judiciary, for military retraining and external retraining) under different donor countries, creating an imbalance of outcomes directly responsible for the sector's current instability. In short, it's not a pretty picture. What Obama is trying is exceedingly ambitious -- he wants to shake Afghanistan out of its dependency on American military by next summer; and he needs to do this first by imposing a burst of military action on the insurgency-ridden region, so there is actually a secure region to hand over to a better-equipped, better-trained Afghan army next year.

Is any war action risky? Absolutely. But a Bush response is to avoid talk of risk, avoid talk of cost, and above all avoid talk of responsibility. Obama is doing none of those things. There are no easy answers to Afghanistan. This could fail. But it also has a higher chance of success than either a gradual or overnight withdrawal from the region. Like it or not, Obama cannot be a peacetime president without first dealing with the huge fallout of sustained government action in Afghanistan over the previous eight years.

[supergee.livejournal.com]

Nah. He would still have lots more dumb shit to do.