It's time for Obama to face facts: Afghanistan is his war now

I've cringed each time the president tell us that he has inherited two wars and an economic debacle. By way of metaphor, he uses a mop to explain his predicament. Hey, my heart goes out to him. But, hey, he is the CEO,CFO and Commander-in-Chief. It doesn't get any tougher than that. Or does it? He has to deal with, literally, a house of cards, well, three of them to be exact and they're all over-the-top McMansions. Caution borne of deliberative thinking, weighing options, flipping the coin over to examine the other side - I applaud him for doing these. Others may call it stalling but as he has said repeatedly he wants to "get it right." And getting it "right" is his moral dilemma. Deep down I suspect he doesn't want to send any troops. He probably wants to pull out. Politically, he probably will send less than 40k. Strategically, COIN is doomed. He must be contemplating whether or not his choice will vilify or vindicate. Only time will tell, huh? Poor guy.

"Strategically, COIN is doomed." No, tactically COIN is doomed, because Americans will simply not stand for the time it will take that grand tactic to help achieve our strategic goal(s) in Afghanistan.

President Obama knows that, so he'll look for implementing some middle ground (half-baked) measure that will eventually allow for an exit prior to next election.

America might well have had the patience for thoroughgoing counterinsurgency in Afghanistan had it not been preceded by years of drift sponsored by America's last Commander in Chief. Screwing around for the better part of a decade and then blaming the country because it won't take the chance that the next few years of campaigning will be done right and fix the problem is a little Cheneyish for my taste.

I hope President Obama is fully alive to his responsibilities to the many thousands of Americans in harm's way today. I wonder about it sometimes, because I know he comes to his office awfully green and because I do not know him well. I think he needs all the help he can get, including help from people on the other side in domestic politics. In this respect, someone in Peter Feaver's position could actually offer the President something quite useful. He could apologize.

I realize that many people in holding appointive office in the last administration feel indebted to former President Bush and his Vice President both professionally and on a personal level, or came to their former posts from the campaign world, where you do and say what your patron requires you to do and say, in public anyway. However, I know also that many people who worked in the Bush administration genuinely supported its chief and the way it was run. They thought the American men and women sacrificed in Iraq were a price worth paying for freedom being on the march; they thought Afghanistan deserved to be on the back burner for years; they thought the venality, contempt for other branches of government, and casual incompetence with which the Bush administration approached vital issues from Kabul to Baghdad to New Orleans to Wall Street represented their kind of governance. To these people, being a Commander in Chief means acting like George W. Bush.

That they don't quite have the nerve to say this is not to their credit. Bush Republicans complain when the administration they served is criticized, but don't always have the belly to defend it. My suggestion is, don't defend it or its chief. Acknowledge its failure publicly; recognize that it reported to a President distinguished by his ignorance, self-absorption and sense of entitlement, a fundamentally weak President who let his country down badly. President Obama will have an easier time dealing with the very long list of exceptionally difficult problems dumped on him by his predecessor if his predecessor's appointees accepted their failure with manly candor.

Lyndon Johnson's appointees, by and large, did not do this after the President they served had left office, a fact that made the Nixon administration's dreadful inheritance in Vietnam appreciably more difficult to deal with. It's not a happy precedent, and it's one Peter Feaver and other Bush administration appointees could shun by simply saying in public what everyone else knows: that they came into government with admirable social and academic pedigrees, served a wholly inadequate President, and with him put the man now in the White House in a desperately difficult situation -- actually, in several of them.

They could apologize, if not to Obama then at least to the country. Calls like that in the main post here for Obama to own the war in Afghanistan are essentially calls for him to show his courage. It's past time for people making them to show a little personal courage of their own.

Call me old-fashioned, but I greatly admire the Framers for the Separation of Powers in the Constitution. Especially relevant is Article 1, Section 8:

"The Congress shall have power ...

To define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the law of nations;
...
To declare war, ..."

The Framers intentionally proscribed any President from unilaterally taking the country to war - the power to declare war was entrusted to the Congress, the democratically-elected representatives of our new Nation, where careful deliberation could drive consensus. No President is Constitutionally empowered to make the decision to go to war alone.

While Article 2 makes the President the Commander in Chief of the Army and the Navy (which requires unity of command), the power to declare that the United States was in a state of war was invested in the Congress. Since Americans are in Afghanistan to punish and prevent Al Qua'eda's "(airborne) piracies, felonies and offenses against the laws of nations," America should follow the intentions of the Framers: Congress should declare war (on Al Qua'eda).

President Obama should show strength and his faith in America and in the Constitution -- he should ask for a Declaration of War from Congress, give compelling reasons for that request and tell how America will define victory in the conflict. If Congress votes to declare war the President can better prosecute it; if Congress declines then the President can deploy American forces to best enhance American power and security (think Iran, North Korea, Yemen).

Congressional debate and decision are essential. It's time to return to the Constitution. It's time to vote to Declare War.

Obama should stop the war. This will not succeed and will just turn to more horrible thing. Just like any other short term credit tool, they are best used with restraint, and responsibility. Also, many lenders have gone online, so it can be easier and faster than ever to get a payday advance loan if you need one for an emergency expenditure.

I don't see a big difference between either of the parties or any of the last leaders, except for media and partisan spin.

Clinton bombed Iraq in 1998 for "WMD", Obama policy in the war is very similar to Bush's so far.

I see a small details like "no more waterboarding". Personally I might rather be waterboarded than a constant fear of butt rape in american jails or killed by missiles in Pakistan (Hillary was recently defending their usage).

Also don't see how americans are "more evil" than others, as seems from who gets the nasty news coverage. Thousands apparently disappeared in Chechnya due to Russian army, Taliban and others do much worse than "waterboarding" including before 2001.

As far as foreign policy and other causes leading to "US bankruptcy", no huge difference, Obama spends money as fast as those who came before him, and just like Obama, Bush can claim came from before... the 2 laws that deregulated the investment banking were put in by Bill Clinton Era and the republican houses, and 2001 attack was planned before Bush took over and foreshadowed by another attempt on WTC in 1993.

Let’s get this straight. Peter Feaver is a war commentator. He has a realty good friend named Cohen, also seemingly some sort of civilian. Feaver finds spot on Cohen’s “larger point,” which is that “with this decision [about sending more troops to Afghanistan, president Obama is] really going to own this war, and he’s going to be sending young men and women to their deaths”.

This is, to be polite, a really crappy and irrelevant point, because the president sent some thousands of young Americans to Afghanistan and their possible deaths about eight months ago – something Cohen & Feaver seem to have forgotten. Doesn’t fit in with their view of the world.

The joint comment shows that the civilians writing this stuff, in the absence of fact, are turning to fiction and incest: Commentator A writes some ill-considered nonsense, good friend commentator B adds, presumably for a fee, “Like that! Like that!” Both are of course patronizing and insulting when they parade their understanding that the president is facing a really serious issue, in a way that suggests the president isn’t aware of the fact.

But we all know that he is. So how does this nonsense see the light of so many PC screens?

you're playing at semantics, being way too delicate - Obama owned this war the moment he decided to run for president - hell, the moment he decided to juice up his political ambitions by opposing the Iraq war he owned it because at that moment he was letting it be known that he understood 'the big questions' and was willing and able to make the big decisions thereof - he compounded this avowal and commitment and responsibility by embracing the war in Afghanistan during the election - if he didn't understand the nature of that responsibility or didn't care to examine it too closely for fear such an examination might undermine the political utility of looking like a guy who could make 'the big decisions', well, who's to blame for that?

The great unknown about Obama [although personally I thought the answer quite obvious] was what would happen when he had to make a difficult decision that fell outside of his ideological comfort zone. Pass a leviathan of a stimulus package, easy! Pursue massive health care reform - can make that choice over breakfast - those things all nicely comply with his ideological imperatives. But war? The cold hard realities of foreign policy? The brutal, visceral cunning of power, of force against force?

Obama's apologists would have that this endless debate is a good thing but I say it's a manifestation of fear - there's no safe refuge of ideological purity here, no quick satisfaction of acting in accordance with a naive world view that has served him well til now but is a template that no longer fits the harsh realities on the ground. He's afraid and wants to believe that an endless appeal to reason or the vanities of an intellectual inertia will subdue the demons waiting in the shadows, will free him from the curse of action.

Obama can deal with health care reform not going as he may have planned because the ideological satisfaction will still be there to sustain him. But a war decision that doesn't go as he would hope? Or a complication or confrontation on the global stage that resists his charms and insists in acting against his wishes? We've seen his response: every foreign policy gesture he has made since taking office has telegraphed a preference for compromise and accommodation - has telegraphed weakness. He did try to play tough with Israel but even backed down from that - wisely, as far as I'm concerned, but still.

His apologists will loudly declaim against such a portrayal, and obviously the man could still prove me wrong - but until facts emerge that suggest otherwise I'll maintain that America has not elected another Jimmy Carter, they've elected someone worse.

Every American that cast their vote, and even every American that failed to cast their vote owns this war. Unless you supported an isolationist candidate, we're all in this mess now.

As for the President, give the guy a break. He's only doing what he feels President Bush neglected to do; DEMAND concrete, quantifiable, verifiable, measureable, milestones with which we can truely assess how effective our military presence is.

McChrystal, God help him and all of us, may have worked his keester off in compiling his proposal to the President for a surge, but have any of you read the reasons he posits for the request? And I cite Page 7 for a decent summation.

The ratcheting up of ANSF is a tricky proposition given the ineffectiveness it has shown so far in field operations.

Anyone who's awake nowadays knows how we're faring on the 'accountable governance' front.

How exactly do we quantify 'gaining the initiative?'

And focusing resources can only be done when you have the resources, which is what the purpose of this proposal is, which thus far isn't very convincing.

How do you commit 40,000 additional troops where you're effectively throwing your support behind corrupt torturers and panderers, with no clear mission, and no end in sight?

So I completely understand why the President is taking his jolly old time.

10 bucks says that when he decides, he'll push the additional troops as a 'neccesary mechanism' to prepare for an organized and safe 'all out' withdrawl within a fixed timeline.

There are several issues here that require comment:

1. Obama's principal objective as president appears to be to prove to Muslims how Muslim-friendly he is, so, even if al-Qaeda were a state, there would be no request for a declaration of war. Obama will not ask Congress for a declaration of war on al-Qaeda becuase that is contrary to his first principle of foreign policy and becuase doing so will enable that organization to use it as proof that the US is at war with Islam. Forget about a declaration of war; it won't happen.

2. Obama's dithering on the Afghan issue arises from the interplay of his peculiar psychological makeup (narcissist)and the intellectual recognition that he cannot continue to be true to his ideology and advance American interests at the same time. He will have to make a decision between two incompatible goals, a decision that will determine the fate of his presidency and, perhaps eevn more important to him, how he is regarded in history. Either decision will expose some aspect of Obama's real self that he has kept carefully hidden so far.

3. Obama also has to hope that the Iraq situation goes bad. If it succeeds, it will provide evidence that the principal problem with the Bush approach was his initial unwillingness to pay the cost of attaining his objectives. Since Obama is also unwilling to pay the cost, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, both domestically and internationally, a failure in Afghanistan will make him the loser in comparsions with the hated George Bush.

4. Afghanistan cannot be solved by giving a speech. Since Obama's favorite call is giving speeches, he may be incapable of dealing with this issue.

There is really no strategy except to negotiate with the tribes (not "Taliban" whatever that means). Buy the poppies, give them money to run their forces (as we did in Iraq). Otherwise my Marine son risks his life yet again for a fantasy.

Over the last 50 years, successive US presidents have taken short-sighted decisions as commanders-in-chief regarding going to war in foreign lands against so called 'enemies' who were not threatening the US directly. Common perception is they did this primarily to support their arms industry. Amazingly, they didn't think these 'operations' through; they obviously weren't chess players. Their projections were at most 2 ply, if that.

Well, 9/11 and today's Af-Pak war is a direct fall-out of this; particularly the US policy followed in Afghanistan during the Russian invasion and the 1st gulf war. It's the United States - with its ham-handed, gun toting, wild-west actions - that is the direct cause of the complete mayhem that now exists in areas that were once peacefully minding their own business, even if they weren't exactly models of democracy (according to uncle sam).

Thus, the US owns the war no matter who the President is - and if Obama is suffering pangs of conscience and wants to keep his hands from being bloodied, tough luck. The US caused the situation; therefore it has to clean up the mess - whatever it takes.

An entire (long) post and a heap of comments based on nothing more than the expressed opinion of an observer who, like Dr. Feaver, was an official in the last administration and has an interest in painting this administration as inferior? So it would seem.

The notion that Obama has not owned this war in the sense that he has yet to send US troops to their deaths seems quite odd given that he ordered a large troop increase in February. Some of those troops, no doubt, were sent to their deaths. Why then, Dr. Feaver, do you imagine that only now is this realization sinking in?

That you would spend a week mulling this notion over says more about you than it does about the president.

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