|
|
| A knee-jerk decision |
| Ghulam Asghar Khan |
| “Some 70 years ago a promising young neurologist made a discovery that necessitated the addition of a new word to English vocabulary. He insisted that this should be knee-jerk, and knee-jerk it has remained, in spite of the efforts of patellar reflex to dislodge it. He was my father; so perhaps, I have inherited a prejudice in favour of home-made words,” so writes Ernest Gowers, a British writer in the mid-twentieth century. And, in the twenty-first century, it is Gen. McChrystal who wants President Obama to take a knee-jerk decision to risk thousands of American lives in Afghanistan, simply because that’s what he wants.
Today, screeds calling Obama to prioritise lightening-fast decision over measured deliberations are increasingly common place in the pseudo-experts, even after a crisis brought on by their ideological know-nothingism. It is one thing for talk-show anchors to glamourise their willful ignorance, which is entirely different to the basic process of thinking by the professional sages who lead the intelligentsia. When these supposed experts of political cognition and empiricism begin publicly flaying leaders for taking time to fully evaluate potential decisions, it’s a sign that the country is becoming the ignorance-deifying idiocy that all the citizens should fear.
Apparently, President Obama is caught in a strange jinx and has three options to cast off the curse. One is to avoid the predicament. The second is to pick the least bad of the available options and the third is to mix and match among the proposed solutions and minimize the long-term damage any decision would cause. If, he is not the part of the solution, he is part of the predicament.
Obama exactly faces this dilemma in Afghanistan and is likely to settle on something closer to the third option. It might not satisfy everybody, yet it might be the least dangerous option. Desperate situations call for desperate measures and it could possibly catch his opponents on the jaw. In any case troop-surge in Afghanistan is not the remedy. “The best way to solve any problem is to remove its cause,” said Martin Luther King Jr. There, possibly, is one and the only cause; end the occupation of Afghanistan and peace would prevail. The question is, can Obama take such a bold stand?
Obama cannot do this. With enthusiasts for an all-out counterinsurgency strategy around him, he knows that he has to take a decision that would be sustainable in the long run, which means taking into account domestic economic and political realities. One of these is the weariness over the truth that Andrew Bacevich, the hard-line foreign policy analyst, put more plainly than most: “that permanent war has become the de-facto policy of the United States. These hard-liners have always been more than willing to battle insurgents. What they did not count on, and were not led to expect, when G.W. Bush committed troops to Afghanistan and Iraq, that two long, violent, indefinite occupations costing thousands of lives and hundreds of billion dollars.
The costs are certainly worrying Obama and getting under the skin of Congressional Democrats tired of attacks on their fiscal credentials. That’s why it’s significant that a group of House Democrats led by David Obey chose last week, in anticipation of Obama’s decision to introduce a bill requiring the president to set a surtax to pay for war costs in Afghanistan.
The proposal might never become a law, but it sends a clear message that any troop increase Obama proposes would be wildly unpopular among those who have been his strongest supporters. Obama is cognisant that patience with permanent war is wearing out. That is why he will insist that he is not committing troops indefinitely. It will not be open-ended, but limited in time and the focus will be on strategy, not the number of troops. It’s likely that the number of additional troops might be below the 40,000 proposed by Gen. McChrystal. Obama insists that a surge in Afghanistan cannot work in the same way it did in Iraq, because conditions on the ground are so different. Yet in the wake of 9/11, he sees US as having vital interests in Afghanistan that it didn’t have in Vietnam. The need to defeat terrorists in both Afghanistan and Pakistan is the prime object of the US policy in the region.
It is expected that early next week Obama will announce a surge of about 35,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, who will be deployed in waves beginning in March next year. It will be Obama’s second major escalation in Afghanistan. He had authorised an increase of 21,000 soldiers soon after he entered the White House. While not disclosing details of the plan, Obama declared at a Tuesday joint news conference with the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that he intended to finish the job in Afghanistan. The plan was reportedly finalised at a Monday night meeting of Obama’s war council. Attending the gathering were the proponents of three different strategies, all of which propose a massive increase of militarist violence.
The advocates of a big counterinsurgency are offended at anyone who raises the financial cost issues of US commitments. Those most angered by any talk about the immense expense of these wars are typically the very conservatives who bemoan America’s fiscal condition and the dangers of long-term deficits, but had no qualms over starting two wars and cutting taxes at the same time.
President Obama seems to be under the influence of war-mongering generals who are possessed by the blood-sucking war-demons and want to spill more blood in Afghanistan. Vice President Joe Biden, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and the US ambassador in Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry are said to have favoured a smaller increase of 10,000 to 15,000 troops. But they seem to have failed against a very powerful “hawkish group” comprising Gen McChrystal and Gen. Petraeus appear to have prevailed. And then, there is third group led by the Defence Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mullen that supported McChrystal’s demand for 40,000. So, the balance tilted in favour of the “hawks” who grabbed about 35,000, while a small slice of 5,000 was cut to cheer up the “doves” led by the Vice President. The media accounts say that Obama split the difference between the Biden/McChrystal proposals by joining the third camp, but his surge would be much in line with what was proposed by Gen. McChrystal. So it was a day of the so-called “Hawks” who failed Bush and now are leading Obama on the same dreadful path. The hoax of “exit strategy” stands exposed. These are only gimmicks to hoodwink the American citizens and the world at large. Washington has no intention of diminishing its occupation for years. Administration officials privately concede that the troops will remain for at least a decade. Perhaps, they are waiting for a similar fate that befell the Soviets after 10 years of Afghan war. The USSR dismantled! |
|
|