61.0°,
Mostly Cloudy Is it déjà vu all over again in Afghanistan?
I listened carefully to the president’s speech at West Point last Tuesday evening and watched, closely, too, to read his mood and body language. Standing before an audience of cadets, he said he would order some 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan.
Since it is they who will serve, the moment was striking, the coming together of the commander in chief and the young men and women who will heed his call to war.
He said it would be a time-limited surge, with the goal of breaking the back of Al Qaeda operating on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. He said we would help the Afghan government become effective enough to push back the Taliban and run its own country.
I believe he believes we need to launch this offensive. I see him as an honest but reluctant warrior, agonized over a plan that has no guarantee of success. I read his mood as deeply serious and even somber. The weight of this decision, its cost to him, was apparent in his affect and low-key delivery.
For myself, after hearing his case, the best case he could make, I did not completely understand why we need to send thousands more kids to Afghanistan. I worry that the proposed time limits will get stretched and extended, from 18 months to years of costly commitment. I worry that this is yet another misguided attempt to “fight them there.”
I don’t believe that the efforts of American and allied soldiers can effect a real change on the ground in Afghanistan, where the government is corrupt and the people don’t trust us and millions of people live in primitive villages, bound to tribal leaders and laws. Even a modest understanding of history tells me that Afghanistan has always defeated its invaders and occupiers.
Of course, this brings back the winter of 2003, the months leading up the invasion of Iraq. I doubted then, too, that the war seemed justified and plausible and necessary and worth the price in men and women and money. Then I heard Gen. Colin Powell’s talk at the U.N., and I decided that if he said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and if he was supporting the war, then I had to be OK with it. Didn’t the president and his people know more than I did?
