"No more troops to Afghanistan" - by HDS Greenway
With General Stanley A. McChrystal’s report calling for additional troops now public, President Obama will soon have his King Henry moment; whether or not to send more troops into the ever-worsening war in Afghanistan. Much depends on his definition of the mission. Is it to defeat the Taliban in battle as Henry defeated the flower of French chivalry? There will be no famous victories in the irregular warfare that has so marked Afghanistan over the centuries. Is it to create a viable, democratic, centralized state on a Western model? When he came to power, Obama seemed to realize that the mission of his predecessor, George W. Bush, was too ambitious and that he should settle for simply making Afghanistan inhospitable to Al Qaeda. In the meantime, however, “mission creep’’ - the tendency of any mission to expand and grow if it is not carefully pruned - has been the order of the day. Obama runs the risk of turning Afghanistan into a full-fledged dependency of the United States.
Recently, when asked if he risked the fate of Lyndon Johnson whose presidency was consumed by a war started by his predecessors, but which he chose to reinforce, Obama replied: “You have to learn lessons from history. On the other hand, each historical moment is different. You never step into the same river twice. And so Afghanistan is not Vietnam.’’
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