US Elections

America on tilt: Obama announces 30 thousand troops for Afghanistan

By Jonathan Bradley in Sydney

3 December 2009

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Is it any surprise that Barack Obama's speech to West Point cadets announcing an additional 30 000 troops for the war in Afghanistan has been so poorly received? Given, in essence, the question the Clash's Joe Strummer posed in 1982 - should I stay or should I go? - Obama answered with a decisive "Yes!" 

That is, he announced a so-called surge of troops, and a date, July 2011, to begin withdrawing them. Well, unless his generals tell him the troops should stay. And since generals like winning wars, and he hasn't announced any actual benchmarks for the Afghan government to aim for, this doesn't sound like a very solid exit plan.

True, it is easy to be critical of Obama's plan sitting here in Sydney, particularly when I'm a young man of military service age in a country with troops directly involved in this conflict who has made no moves to enlist for duty. And Obama's dilemma is not an easily solved one. All but the most idealistic hawks must have abandoned hopes that Afghanistan could be transformed into some kind of South Asian version of South Korea. And even an ardent dove must fear that a destabilised Pakistan and Taliban-administered Afghanistan with huge swathes of wild, poor, rural and mostly lawless country is a dangerous combination once nuclear weapons are added to the mix - to say nothing of the inevitably brutal disregard for human rights that would follow.

Of course, neither option is really on the table for the Administration; the arguments have revolved around exactly what shape the twin courses of staying and going should look like; whether the focus should be on counter-insurgency, or nation building, or some other approach. I don't mean to trivialise the important arguments being undertaken by important men and women that will lead to every day American (and Australian) men and women to be put into harm's way. But America's unfortunate situation seems to be as much about a grand historical shift in policy that hasn't been matched with an equally large change in the nation's temperament.

The historian Ken Burns said in his PBS series, "if you want to know about this thing called the United States of America you have to know about the Civil War," and I'm wondering if the Vietnam War should be seen as a modern equivalent. Prior to that war, the American mentality regarding foreign action was generally consistent: they didn't do it very often, but when they did, they won. Sure, the Korean War left behind a communist state that troubles the U.S. to this day, but it also established a thriving, modern democracy in the south of the country. Until Vietnam, it wasn't hard to see America as something like a cautious poker place from the old West, one who kept his cards close to his chest and played few hands, but when he went in, he went all in. Remember, for instance, how difficult it was to convince America to enter World War II, surely a war the U.S. had both a moral and pragmatic interest in, even prior to 1941. But such was America's reluctance to involve itself in a foreign conflict that even when German submarines sunk the USS Reuben James in October 1941, America remained officially neutral until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor dragged it into war.

By contrast, Vietnam was a long, drawn-out affair based on at-best contentious policy objectives, that involved a relatively small sacrifice from the American public at large, disproportionately focused on the young, mostly working-class young men who qualified for the draft and could not or would not gain a deferment. Vietnam was expensive, and not paid for; Lyndon Johnson continued implementing his Great Society programs rather than convert to a wartime economy.

Poker aficionados will be aware of the concept of "tilt", the frame of mind a good player gets into after a bad loss. The player will make bad decisions, chase risky hands and watch helplessly as his or her good luck goes bad. Since Vietnam, America's military action seems to have been on tilt.

That's a bad state of mind for a populace that expects to win its wars. But Vietnam set a bad precedent for American military action, and while comparing wars is a dangerous venture, the one comparison that can be made between the war in South East Asia and the current one in Afghanistan is the mentality behind them. Despite some small successes in the '80s and '90s, mostly about giving temporary backing to governments friendly to American interests, in major conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. still believes it can prosecute a war while not troubling the lives or wallets of the majority of its population. Congress is currently grappling with a surtax that would cover a very tiny portion of the amount the U.S. has spent on Iraq and Afghanistan this decade, and despite a population that is lukewarm about the war and increasingly concerned about the deficit, this is unlikely to pass.

At the Washington Post, Ezra Klein says:

What began as fiscal irresponsibility is slowly transforming into hard precedent. The original deployment to Afghanistan was a rapid reply to a devastating attack that took place amidst an economy shaken by terrorism and the stock market collapse. I get why no one stopped to levy a new tax. It was arguably the right decision.

But then the war in Iraq, which was a war of choice begun amidst a stronger economy, wasn't paid for either. The surge in Iraq, and the escalation in Afghanistan, both will be strategies of choice, and they won't be paid for.

We've had wars of necessity, wars of choice, and the escalations of those wars stretching across both good and bad economies, and both Democratic and Republican presidents. And none of them have been paid for. The political system is learning to think of war as an off-budget expense, which is bad both from the perspective of the deficit, but also from the perspective of forcing us to confront the costs and tradeoffs of war.

I would argue that Americans not only think of war as an off-budget expense, they also think of it as an out-of-mind expense; that is, a problem they can delegate to a professional military rather than invest in personally. That is not only unfair to the men and women serving abroad, it's also unsustainable. Obama is in a deep bind in Afghanistan, and the best that can be hoped for is that his troop influx helps brings thing to an acceptable close as quickly as possible. But once that happens, without disavowing small, practical, humanitarian exercises, America must return to its pre-Vietnam state of mind. It must see war as a rare exercise that requires it to go all in, psychologically and economically.

Tags: Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Defence

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