With one word, “if,” President Obama this week raised the fear that America’s gains in Afghanistan will go down the drain, as they did in Iraq.
True: Afghanistan is no Iraq. After all, as Obama’s told us time and again, the latter was a terrible blunder while the former was “the good war.”
That’s why, at the end of his first year as president, Obama ordered (albeit unenthusiastically, according to his defense secretary at the time, Bob Gates) an Afghan “surge” of 30,000 troops.
Yet their successes, hard won with blood and guts, could well be reversed now, as Afghan President Hamid Karzai refuses to sign an agreement that his own government negotiated with Washington last year.
That pact would allow some US presence in Afghanistan even after most of our troops leave at the end of this year. Obama says he wants to finalize the accord, but he mostly sounds enthusiastic about getting out.
More than 60,000 troops have already left Afghanistan, Obama boasted Tuesday in his State of the Union Address. To thundering applause he said that soon “America’s longest war will finally be over.”
Great. Then what? “If the Afghan government signs a security agreement that we have negotiated, a small force of Americans could remain” for training and assisting Afghans in their pursuit of al Qaeda, Obama said.
If?
Flashback: Soon after taking office the new president faced a similar situation in Iraq. He half-heartedly tried to negotiate a Status of Forces Agreement, or SOFA, with the Iraqi government to leave a residual US presence after the bulk of the force left. But Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki made unreasonable demands, and Obama, whose overarching goal was to get out, gave up and ordered all the troops to leave by the end of 2011.
Remember, this was not long after a surge of US troops defeated al Qaeda in Iraq, something that had seemed like mission impossible.
But Sunni Iraqis were sick and tired of the foreign terrorists that usurped their main stronghold, Anbar Province. So the US force, led by Gen. David Petraeus, rallied them and managed to chase al Qaeda out.
Zoom back to now: Last month an al Qaeda offshoot, this time called “the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria,” took over Anbar’s main cities, Falujah and Ramadi.
Before Obama “ended” the Iraq war, we got good at rallying Iraqi partners to help us and themselves — and for that, not too many US troops are needed. But with none in the country, the gains of the Iraqi surge are now gone.
Ditto Afghanistan. “We won’t survive unless the United States maintains some presence” next year, a top Afghan diplomat told me recently.
To be sure, that’s clearly not what Karzai says. He’s amassing impossible new demands (including, weirdly, a US promise to negotiate with the Taliban, his own enemies) before signing the agreement.
Obama says he wants Karzai to sign on — but that little “if” on Tuesday indicates that he’s markedly less sure about it than he is about “ending” the war.
And there’s more: According to the administration’s favorite paper, The New York Times, Obama recently gathered a panel of experts “to devise alternatives to mitigate the damage if a final security deal cannot be struck with the Afghan president.”
He’s worried because the mainstay of his terror-fighting, drone strikes, is about to be lost. If we leave Afghanistan with no agreement, his security aides tell him, we’ll lose our drone bases in the entire region.
As the Afghan diplomat made abundantly clear to me, a SOFA pact is in the Karzai government’s interest. Yet Obama, who’s made room for so much understanding of how adversaries like Iran have political needs that sometimes makes them say horrible things in public, fails to see the same in Karzai’s posturing.
Seven decades after World War II, we still have troops in Germany. US troops still guard the 38th parallel, though a Korean War ceasefire was reached back in 1953.
Obama, however, seems to think that “ending” wars is more important than securing the gains made in them. And no matter that, of the 1,500 Americans killed in the Afghan war, 975 were slain on Obama’s watch. If we let Afghanistan fall apart now, what was the point?
Let’s face it: Karzai is there because of America and he’d be in real trouble if we don’t maintain some presence in his country. More importantly, a residual force in Afghanistan is vital to America’s security.
So where does this nagging “if” come from?