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In terms of Afghanistan
Could become Obama’s Vietnam,
confirms The New York Times
PRESIDENT Obama had not even taken office before
supporters were etching his likeness onto Mount
Rushmore as another Abraham Lincoln or the second
coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Yet
what if they got the wrong predecessor? What if Mr.
Obama is fated to be another Lyndon B. Johnson
instead?
 To
be sure, such historical analogies are overly
simplistic and fatally flawed, if only because each
presidency is distinct in its own way. But the L.B.J.
model — a president who aspired to reshape America
at home while fighting a losing war abroad — is one
that haunts Mr. Obama’s White House as it seeks to
salvage Afghanistan while enacting an expansive
domestic program.
Just
as Mr. Johnson believed he had no choice but to
fight in Vietnam to contain communism, Mr. Obama
last week portrayed Afghanistan as the bulwark
against international terrorism. “This is not a war
of choice,” he told the Veterans of Foreign Wars at
their convention in Phoenix. “This is a war of
necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are
plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the
Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe
haven from which Al Qaeda would plot to kill more
Americans.”
However, after almost eight years, the U.S. people’s
support for the war in Afghanistan has declined
dramatically. Last week, The New York Times and CBS
News published a survey showing that popular support
for the war now stands at less than 50%.
That
growing disenchantment in the countryside is
increasingly mirrored in Washington, where liberals
in Congress are speaking out more vocally against
the Afghan war and newspapers are filled with more
columns questioning America’s involvement. The cover
of the latest Economist is headlined “Afghanistan:
The Growing Threat of Failure.”
Lt.
Col. Douglas A. Ollivant, a retired Army officer who
worked on Iraq on the National Security Council
staff first for George W. Bush and then for
President Obama, said Afghanistan may be “several
orders of magnitude” harder. It has none of the
infrastructure, education and natural resources of
Iraq, he noted, nor is the political leadership as
aligned in its goals with those of America’s
leadership.
“We’re in a place where we don’t have good options
and that’s what everyone is struggling with,”
Colonel Ollivant said. “Sticking it out seems to be
a 10-year project and I’m not sure we have the
political capital and financial capital to do that.
Yet withdrawing, the cost of that seems awfully high
as well. So we have the wolf by the ear.”
And as L.B.J. discovered, the wolf has sharp teeth.
Y como Lyndon B. Johnson descubrió, el lobo tiene
los colmillos afilados.
(Published in The New York Times. Summary by
CubaDebate) |
