Out of Afghanistan

President Obama has a crucial decision to make, and it is one that very well could prove to be a tipping point for his presidency. Of the many roles that a president fills, none is more important than his role as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, which becomes even more vital during time of war. The president is the decider, and choices about military strategy are literally life and death decisions, which takes precedence over any other type of policy that is the president's responsibility. President Obama should make the wise and courageous decision to begin an immediate withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, and to continue the withdrawal already begun in Iraq.

The conventional wisdom on Afghanistan is that it is the good war. Benjamin Franklin, one known for wisdom and for being anything but conventional, once stated that there never was a good war or a bad peace. I'm solidly with Franklin on this count. The story we are sold to justify this war is that we are fighting against Al-Qaeda and therefore both avenging 9/11 and ensuring that our nation is not attacked again. Neither point is true. We are fighting the Taliban, the group that originally had been harboring Al-Qaeda, but from different sources I have read, has long since kicked out their guests because they tired of the trouble caused by housing them. Al-Qaeda has since taken up shelter in the no-man's land that encompasses eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan, an area that is both remote and not controlled by any national government. If we are serious about going after Osama bin Laden and his army, that is where we should be, not fighting against the Taliban, a group with no global designs or desire to attack America.

The notion of making our country safe from attack is also a false notion. We like to justify our Asian adventures with slogans like freedom isn't free and brandishing our support for the troops on bumper stickers and t-shirts. Defending the nation is arguably the most important job of the government, but there are more effective ways of doing it than the way we are going about it. Obama was elected by a majority of the voting populace just over a year ago, and many of us cast our votes in hope that we were getting an intelligent man who could understand the complexity and nuance of foreign policy. Our last president certainly could not, his view of the world was overly simplistic, in his philosophy you were either with us or against us, and his crusade was to rid the world of evil-doers with brute force. Our new president would understand that there are a variety of means at our disposal in order to make the world, and ultimately America, a safer place.

While Obama's rhetoric so far has given those of us who realize that the rest of the world is no longer our suzerain a measure of hope, his actions have yet to match that rhetoric. To win hearts and minds in the Arab and Muslim world it will take more than good speeches and intent to tackle difficult problems, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It will take getting off of the fence and supporting nascent political movements, such as the one developing in Iran in opposition to the theocracy that has dominated that nation for the last 30 years. It will take more forceful opposition to sham elections, such as the one that recently allowed the government led by Hamad Karzai to maintain power in Afghanistan. It will take supporting education and social welfare to counter the impact of fundamentalist Islamist groups who are the ones that currently provide most of both throughout the Middle East.

By continuing to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan, we are misusing resources and wasting an opportunity to truly make our nation and the world safer by supporting conditions that will allow for the Middle East to become more modern, moderate, and less anti-Western. If Obama goes ahead with his plan to enact his surge in Afghanistan, the cost estimates are between $40-50 billion per year, according to a report in the New York Times. If more troops are added that means that more troops will be killed and maimed, that more families will be without fathers and mothers, sons and daughters. If we were fighting the Nazi's to prevent them from controlling Europe and going after the perpetrators of Pearl Harbor in the Pacific, we could justify both the financial cost and most importantly the risk of life and limb. We would be willing as a nation to sacrifice and not simply ask our military and their families to do the job themselves. But we are not fighting a war that must be fought or taking on an enemy that threatens our safety and way of life.

That enemy exists and must be dealt with, but massive military endeavors are not the most effective way to go about that. The American mindset that we can bomb our way to peace and security, if it ever were true, is certainly no longer a realistic way of looking at foreign policy. We are no longer the hegemony that can control events, we are a powerful force that must utilize our allies effectively and must lead the way with a combination of diplomacy, social aid, and targeted military force.

The question is whether or not President Obama really gets it, and if he does whether he will have the courage of his convictions to act on his beliefs. Or will he give in to political expediency and attempt to placate the war hawks without angering the doves who largely came to his camp during the campaign because of his strong stance against the Iraq War. It is a question that will more than any other decision seal Obama's fate as either a potentially great president who impacted the world in a meaningful way, or whether he goes down as one whose promise evaporated in a fog of weakness and indecisiveness. I among many will be carefully watching for this decision, hopeful but realistically not expecting those hopes to be realized. This one decision will more than anything else effect my personal support for Obama and the likelihood that my vote will be cast for him three years from now.