Impossible Scissors

President Obama's deliberations over Afghanistan, ongoing since September, are proving to be agoni9zingly slow for many observers of international and military affairs. At the same time, American forces are still taking casualties in pursuit of the futile existing strategy as morale continues to drop and faith in the mission subsides.

Dick Cheney has emerged from the shadows to accuse president Obama of "dithering" in Afghanistan. General McChrystal has requested 40,000 troops to get the job done, so let's get moving. The White House retorts with a 'not so fast' and claims that the president wants to make the best decision possible.

For starters, there's two problems with the White House's justification for delay. If President Obama is spending a significant amount of time listening to Joe Biden's reservations, he needs to cut it out. After all, Joe Biden has never made a correct foreign policy decision in his life. He's delusional to think we can avoid major conflict with the Taliban, even if our mission focuses solely on fighting al Qaeda. As long as infidels remain in Afghanistan, the Taliban will fight them. There can be no coexistence in Afghanistan until American leaves or until the Taliban is defeated as a competent fighting force.

The other reason for possible delay would be the upcoming Afghan runoff elections, scheduled for November. The President likely wants a legitimate government before committing to a new strategy. But history doesn't support his decision. If anything, governments gain legitimacy when they can ensure the security of the common people. It's much harder for governments to start from a position of legitimacy and try to build security. The civil liberties available under a legitimate government often contradict the actions needed to impose security. Iraq is an example where the government lacked legitimacy because the common people felt threatened. It wasn't until he cracked down on the Shiite militias that Nouri al Maliki was able to gain a measure of legitimacy as Iraq's Prime Minister.

The delay in the Afghan decision boils down to two incompetent politician-leaders. One is Joe Biden, and the other is Hamid Karzai. Success in Afghanistan is too precious to be entrusted to either.

The Washington "FOX Hunt" is definitely on as the White House steps up its war of words against FOX News Channel. Communications Director Anita Dunn, advisor David Axelrod, and chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel are all on record saying that "FOX News" 'isn't really news' and it exists to make money. FOX News, for its part, seems to be enjoying a ratings bump stemming from their newfound public exposure.

The simmering war of words forces me to pause and ask whether the Bush Administration ever singled out media outlets for criticism. Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't remember Tony Snow ever getting on the case of Keith Olbermann and MSNBC, or Dana Perino busting on CNN. Like FOX, MSNBC and CNN have their share of pundits who try to pass opinion off as reporting. The difference is that FOX is very critical of the president, while CNN and MSNBC swoon every time he reads off a teleprompter. I always thought the White House was supposed to be above petty and partisan shots against their detractors in the media. Then again, we're in the season of "change" in the Oval Office. Apparently "change" also includes a coarsening of the political discourse in Washington.

I'm reminded of the presidential campaign, when the Obama campaign launched an "Obama Action Wire" to discredit and smear author David Freddoso for his thoughtful critique The Case Against Barack Obama. The technique reminds me of the rabble-rousers who aim to shout-down anybody they disagree with and dominate the stage. For an administration that seeks to break the conservative stranglehold on talk radio, it's not particularly good at opening itself to intelligent criticism. Rather, President Obama and his staff are trapped in perpetual campaign mode. All I'm seeing from the White House is election-style tactics at controlling the message instead of providing truly bipartisan leadership.

Hopefully President Obama will realize that public attacks against FOX News, like the previous spat with Rush Limbaugh, only strengthens the opponents of the White House while eroding the dignity of the office. If he truly has what it takes to be a leader instead of a politician, he'd tell his staff to kill their childish bickering.

Recent reports suggest that President Obama is prepared to accept a bigger Taliban presence in Afghanistan, focusing on protecting the central government and ramping up offensive operations against al Qaeda. In doing so, he'll be rejecting the recommendation of General McChrystal for 40,000 more troops to regain ground lost to the Taliban.

Henry Kissinger has some important insights into the Afghan riddle. Instead of the current strategy analogous to holding 100 percent of Afghanistan for 75% of the time, he suggests that holding 75% of the territory for 100% of the time is the better choice. It appears that General McChrystal was of the same mindset, choosing to abandon remote outposts (like the one ambushed last weekend, where eight Americans gave their lives in its defense) in favor of keeping the cities safe from the Taliban. The question is how much of Afghanistan we can hold if the president is going to short-change his commanders of the resources he's requested to accomplish the mission.

When it comes to Afghanistan, you have to go big or go home. The current troop levels coupled with the current tactics have resulted in losing ground to the Taliban. It's not even clear that a change in tactics will help the situation as long as troop levels remain unchanged. The troops are getting demoralized as the Taliban regains its influence. They see their comrades dying with nothing to show for their sacrifice. If the president isn't serious about giving this mission the resources it requires, he should pull the troops out now and hand a major propaganda victory to Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar. President Obama seems to be choosing the path of maximized casualties and delayed defeat if he keeps troop levels near today's current numbers.

Afghanistan has a good chance of becoming America's second Vietnam. The sad analogy includes the fact that presidential micromanagement of the war contributed to the mission's failure.

Whether he knows it or not, the legacy of the Obama presidency hangs on the decisions he makes during the next few months in regards to Afghanistan. Forget healthcare, cap & trade, card-check, or stimulus spending. If President Obama doesn't take decisive action soon, he'll be the man who lost Afghanistan and handed Osama bin Laden a major victory. If he endorses General McChrystal's strategy for stabilizing Afghanistan, there's at least a fair shot Afghanistan will resemble something other than a failed state, and give the Muslims of Southwest Asia an alternative to the Taliban's hardline rule.

On one side of the debate are General Stanley McChrystal, commander of US forces in Afghanistan, and CENTCOM commander David Petraeus. The military commanders see the need for a great number of reinforcements to Afghanistan to secure their tenuous grip over the country. The US is currently playing whack-a-mole with the Taliban. The Islamist militia pops up in areas where there is no US presence, the US and allies send in the cavalry, and the Taliban melts away to fight another day. More troops are needed to protect the Afghan populace and prevent the Taliban from regrouping.

On the other end of the debate are politicians like Joe Biden, Carl levin, Dianne Feinstein, and even pubdits like George Will. They would rather save US offensive efforts for wiping out al Qaeda fighters in Pakistan, turning the Afghan mission into one of training an Afghan army.

The last time anybody asked for Joe Biden's opinion on foreign policy, he proposed splitting Iraq into three states, which would only have exacerbated the tensions during that country's period of sectarian violence. Like that proposal, his Afghan ideas might sound good at first glance, but they're entirely impractical. As the generals have pointed out, Afghanistan may be just a year away from slipping into irreversible Taliban control. The politicians have a good point that more foreign troops may alienate the Afghan people, but increased Taliban violence and control over their lives is guarnateed to alienate them even more. Training an army is a very difficult task; the Iraqi Army training began in earnest in 2004; it wasn't until 2008 that it was capable of independent counterinsurgency operations. The task is even more difficult in Afghanistan, where the lack of a uniformed military tradition is a serious impediment to creating a professional army. A professional army also needs a somewhat-stable government to issue marching orders, dictating massive nation-building effort in Afghanistan. Clearly, more time is needed to stand up an Afghan Army, and foreign troops may be the only way to block the Taliban's return to power.

One assumption of the Biden argument is that the Taliban's return to power will not mean the return of al Qaeda to Afghanistan. At this juncture, al Qaeda would rather hide out in the lawless Pakistani frontier than take their chances with the Americans in Afghanistan. But if America were to leave, would the equation change? Odds are good that it will. Bear in mind that al Qaeda's ultimate goal is establishing fundamentalist Islamic governments in all Muslim nations. There's no doubt that Osama bin Laden would view American abandonment of Afghanistan as a major victory, and Jihadis around the world would be emboldened to carry out new offensives against all vestiges of secularism within the Muslim world, and possibly outside the Muslim world.

Back in late 2001 or 2002, the "Out of Afghanistan" debate would have been unthinkable in a country that was still engulfed by the righteous anger stemming from the 9/11 attacks. That things have gotten so bad reflects poorly on President Bush and his cabinet. In reading the book Cobra II, I was struck by Donald Rumsfeld's premature declarations of victory in Afghanistan, to the point where his staffers used the token US force in Afghanistan during that time frame as part of its calculus for the size of force that was needed to stabilize Iraq. Donald Rumsfeld disdained nation-building, even though nation-building was exactly what Afghanistan needed. If the Bush Administration was ever serious about nation-building in Afghanistan, the necessary troops for doing so were tied up in Iraq. Barack Obama was right to say that Iraq was a distraction from Afghanistan, but now he faces a greater challenge. Criticism from the sidelines is easy, but making the decisions as an untested commander-in-chief is hard.

In some ways, the internal White House debate on Afghanistan is confusing. Didn't the president say back in the early spring that there would be a military and civilian surge to accomplish the goals of nation-building in both Pakistan and Afghanistan? A pair of Newsweek articles (here and here) give some great insight into the current debate. So what changed since early spring? There are many factors, including Hamid Karzai's dirty re-election in Afghanistan and rising US and allied casualties. But I think the biggest factor is sticker-shock. President Obama's early rhetoric on Afghanistan came before General McChrystal's assessment that possibly 40,000 more troops are needed, bringing the total NATO forces in Afghanistan to 110,000. It's a military force rivaling the one that had occupied Iraq, and it couldn't be deployed to theater overnight. It also means this war is going to get very costly in terms of casualties and budget. The Biden approach is advertised as "Faster, Cheaper, Better." Unfortunately, it's a faster way for the Taliban to wrest control of Afghanistan away from its admittedly-crooked government and nascent army.

President Obama has some tough decisions to make, and I hope for our country's sake he succeeds. In fact, if he succeeds in Afghanistan, it will outweigh all the damage he's done to our country with his reckless spending. He talked tough on Afghanistan as a presidential candidate; as a president, he still needs to prove that he wasn't just joking when he promised to refocus America's attention on "the real war on terror" in Afghanistan.

With the United Nations focusing yet again on the issue of climate change this week, "Cap and Trade" legislation is gathering the attention ofthe US Senate again. The House bill passed earlier in the summer with a handful of Republican votes after many blue-dog Democrats balked.

To make the legislation more palatable in the Senate, Joe Lieberman is resorting to an interesting tactic: including funding for coal and nuclear plants to win Republican votes. It's an interesting strategy that threatens to alienate many of the liberal Dems who originally supported the Cap & Trade bill.

It's hard to see what more funding for coal-fired plants would accomplish, even the so-called "clean coal" plants. But nuclear power promises electricity for years to come, while emitting no carbon dioxide or gases that cause smog. If I were a Senator, I'd be tempted to vote for the cap & trade bill solely if it had provisions which would wean America away from coal towards nuclear power.

Because "clean" power sources like solar and wind are decades away from meeting America's power needs, the more pragmatic environmentalists are starting to come around. But the bulk of the environmentalist community still rejects nuclear power out of fears of meltdown, nuclear theft, and spent fuel reprocessing and storage. None of these issues is impossible to deal with. After all, we're living in the era of "hope"; these issues have been largely solved by the scientific community, but political considerations prevent them from being implemented. Even President Obama is guilty of closing the door on Yucca Mountain, even though study after study has shown Yucca Mountain to be the best place to store spent nuclear fuel.

The proponents of anthropomorphic global warming present us with a false choice between the economic impacts of "cap and trade," the faraway future of clean, renewable energy, or runaway global warming. But if our nation gives nuclear power the support it deserves, we could combat the potential for anthropomorphic global warming without sacrificing our quality of life.

When it comes to "change," the areas of defense and foreign relations are ripe pickings for a president that wants a blanket undoing of the Bush legacy. President Obama announced that the US would abandon plans to place missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic. Instead, the US will guard against Iranian missile attacks with sea-based defenses and mobile radars.

The danger the Obama Administration is running comes from this concession to the Russians. While the president might view the change as a step towards an improved defense against Iran, the Russians view it as weakness. At least George Bush understood that the perception of American weakness by hostile nations and terrorist groups can be just as dangerous as real weakness.

For Russia, American missile defenses have been perceived as hostility. The reality is far more innocuous, as the Russians have more than enough missiles to overwhelm any possible American defense. The European component of the missile shield was an extra insult to the Russians, because it represented further strengthening of America's ties with Russia's old clients.

Understanding Russian foreign policy is best accomplished under the mindset of paranoia. Russia had been attacked by Germany twice in the 20th century; the Russian response was installing puppet governments in the nations that buffered Russia from the defeated Germany. With the collapse of Communism in Europe, the new Soviet fear is American influence in the former satellite states and the breakaway Soviet republics. The Russian invasion of Georgia last summer (Remember that one? When the best response Obama could muster was some mealy-mouthed words about the UN?) was a bald-faced aggression designed to weaken Georgia's pro-American president.

The Russians are nervous about missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic because they create an American military presence within Russia's "buffer zone," and they're a further step towards the integration of two former Soviet satellites into the western European community. Again, it's a Russian delusion that either of those nations want anything to do with the Russians. The central Slavs of Poland and the Czech Republic have always sided with the Catholic Church over the Orthodox Church, the Roman alphabet over the Cyrillic alphabet, and with the western Europeans over the eastern Slavs. Poland and the Czech Republic have always been, for all intents and purposes, part of the western European cultural heritage. America must unequivocally tell the Russians to butt out.

So what does this have to do with Obama and missile defense? Because it creates the appearance that America will cave to Russian demands. There are perfectly legit reasons for wanting a system that's more mobile and flexible. I see a lot of virtue in the system that the administration currently favors, although I harbor my doubts as to whether it can detect, track and intercept Iranian missiles at the same range that the ground-based system could. But pulling the missile defenses out without replacing them with some other type of military presence looks like unilateral withdrawal in the eyes of the Russians. If nothing else, the president could have offered a pullback from Poland and the Czech Republic if the Russians agreed to be more cooperative on the Iranian nuclear program. But now that card is lost to us, tossed off the table forever.

The fallout from the central European pullback will linger for quite some time. What will an emboldened Russia do next in regards to Iran or central Europe? Which American ally in the former Soviet block will Putin invade next? Apparently the new foreign policy consists of fecklessness in the face of Russian authoritarianism. The mantra of "hope" need not apply to America's supporters in central and eastern Europe.

Imagine my surprise a week ago to learn that with the remembrance of the 9/11 attacks coming quickly, conservative commentator George Will thinks it's time to get out of Afghanistan.

Anybody who read Michael Scheuer's 2004 tome Imperial Hubris probably foresaw what's happening in Afghanistan: a xenophobic population turns against the US and throws its support back to the warlords. Scheuer argued that US should have left the Taliban in place and focused its efforts on wiping out al Qaeda. It sounds nice, but it's hard to see the Taliban allowing free reign for the Americans to take out their al Qaeda benefactors, or how we can keep a broken al Qaeda from regrouping when the issues of poverty and political oppression within the middle east still drive young men towards "jihad."

One of George Will's big points is that there's no will to sustain a large force to protect the Afghan populace for decades. Indeed, I rejected the argument "Iraq is a distraction from Afghanistan" because the Bush Administration was never serious about sending a large force to Afghanistan, regardless of whether we invaded Iraq. Among our NATO allies, countries like the UK and Canada are taking the bulk of the casualties, while Germany, Italy and France are keeping their troops safe in rear-echelon positions. So why is our commitment to the mission waning? It would seem like the policymakers truly have forgotten the horrors of 9/11 and aren't willing to take all necessary steps to prevent al Qaeda's resurgence.

The scariest part of thinking about Afghanistan is having no idea what the end state will look like. At least Iraq resembles a predictable end-state; Iraq has a strong central government with an army that's capable of containing the country's residual insurgency. Afghanistan is still one of the world's poorest countries, and culturally is verymuch living in the stone age. What does Afghanistan have to look like before we can leave? Does Afghanistan need a ceremonial leader who vests the real political power in regional warlords? What quality of life to Afghans need before we can declare Afghanistan safe? There will undoubtedly be a need for a humanitarian mission in Afghanistan long after the military one has ended. But with so many warlords, many of whom operating independently of the Taliban, how do we get them all together to root out al Qaeda and the Taliban?

The Afghan puzzle is one of history's greatest challenges, and I hope that the Obama defense and state departments are up to solving it. It's a fight that seems futile as much as it seems brutal. Yet the consequences of failure are hard to escape, and reverberate seriously across the globe.