Light? What Light? Bring 'Em All Home

[CodeManBob]

Editoirial, The New Mexican, June 24, 2011

The president couldn't have chosen worse words Wednesday as a
framework for announcing a minimal troop withdrawal from Afghanistan:
"The light of a secure peace can be seen in the distance."

Shades of Lyndon Johnson, linked forever to the "light at the end of
the tunnel" he sought to show a press and public increasingly and
properly wary of our war in Vietnam. That war, fought on behalf of a
corrupt regime with our military's hands tied, would go on for another
half-dozen years after Johnson's public-relations campaign on behalf
of futility and 60,000 American deaths before we abandoned the place
amid chaos.

Vietnam/Afghanistan parallels are all too obvious — and too many. Yet
Barack Obama, who called Afghanistan the better of two far-flung
warfronts while winning the presidency, is only reluctantly sticking
to a pledge to pull some of our soldiers out of there in July; a whole
5,000 of the 33,000 he sent "surging" into an already-occupied country
we vengefully invaded for its regime's support of al-Qaida terrorists.
Another 5,000 might be out by the end of this year — more than a
decade since we sent in our troops.

Our attempt to dominate that land, where Alexander the Great, the
British Empire and the Soviet Union failed, has cost 1,500 American
lives, more than a trillion dollars and U.S. credibility for support
of yet another corrupt ruler.

Arguably, we've accomplished what the George W. Bush administration
sought: capital punishment for Osama bin Laden, serious setbacks for
al-Qaida and removal of those one-time "freedom fighters," the
Taliban, from control of the Afghan government.

Without our 100,000 troops there, goes the argument of a still-
dominant White House clique, the Taliban could regain control in
Kabul.

Let them; neither the Hamid Karzai regime nor Afghanistan is worth
another American life, nor the $120 billion a year we're wasting
there. As for notions of nation-building and democracy-promotion,
that's up to the many strains of Afghan people.

Total redeployment of our forces from there won't save that much
money, of course; we'll still have our military to maintain and keep
trained. But its future lies in surgical strikes from the air, the
more of them unmanned the better, against today's terrorists — not in
the massive occupation of lands like Iraq and Afghanistan.

New Mexico's Sen. Jeff Bingaman calls the president's announcement a
good start, while Sen. Tom Udall urges the president to turn over that
nation's security to its own forces within a year or so. Northern New
Mexico's Rep. Ben Ray Luján says we've got to take more significant
steps than the president announced.

But Obama is acting too much like Johnson; he doesn't want to preside
over a military loss.

He doesn't have to; Obama, after all, was the one announcing the
brilliant strike — in Pakistan, not Afghanistan — that got bin Laden.
That was "mission accomplished," as opposed to the phrase cynically
issued by his predecessor in the early stages of our country's assault
on Iraq.

Having demonstrated that we can track terrorists to the ends of the
earth, he can adopt better language than Johnson's:

Vermont Sen. George Aiken, during the Vietnam era, suggested declaring
victory and coming home. Obama should do it — telling our generals and
admirals to rapidly redeploy their men and women out of Afghanistan as
a show of American ability to move quickly and massively to meet any
subsequent threat.

To talk of "light" is to lollygag over a war he inherited from a
notably unenlightened predecessor. If he doesn't do more, sooner, he
could see our allies there and an increasingly restive Congress do it
for him.