The President is Revolting!

...

Hamid Karzai, the President of Afghanistan, came out forcefully against unfettered US and NATO combat operations in the country he nominally leads.   Recently, under the leadership of General Petraeus, special forces nighttime raids have more than tripled - with the attendant increase in Afghan civilian deaths and detentions.  The people are, unsurprisingly, fed up and frightened, and it is the Afghan political leadership, not the foreign military leadership, that must answer for the death, destruction and intimidation.

In another glaring example of the hubris and lack of self-awareness that has come to characterize the US Government, General Petraeus was said to be furious that the President of Afghanistan would have the temerity to suggest he might have some oversight or control over military operations in Afghanistan.  In a particularly American view of the relationship between the occupiers and the occupied, Petraeus not only expects obedience and fealty from the Afghan political leadership, he expects them to be grateful for his willingness to help them by killing and detaining whoever he wants to, whenever he feels the need.  You'll likely remember the prototypical example of this behavior, when Secretary of State Hilary Clinton stood on a giant US airbase just outside of Baghdad and vehemently criticized what she termed Iranian "Interference" in Iraqi affairs.  She kept a straight face, too.

Now it's bad enough that no one in the US government can provide a simple and plausible answer to what American national security imperative requires the massive deployment of military power in a small, poor, mountainous, landlocked nation with no resources thousands of miles from US shores.  It's bad enough that Obama claims to be working to deny al Quaeda access to 'safe havens' in Afghanistan when he knows that their real safe haven is in Pakistan and there isn't anything he can do about that.  It's bad enough that we are told we must defeat a small, local insurgency in Afghanistan no matter what expenditure of lives and resources it requires, but we seem to be much more sanguine about similar or larger insurgencies in places like Somalia, Yemen, Sudan and Nigeria.  But when that military presence demands we pretend to partner with a corrupt thug like Karzai, accepting all the diplomatic and credibility costs that come with it, and then undermine it all by making it clear that, even as President, he has less power in his own country than a 34 year old SpecOps Major from Kentucky.

Afghanistan is a bleeding wound on the American nation, but as often happens with wounds, it provides an opportunity to see more clearly the underlying condition.  It is in Afghanistan that we learn that Barack Obama is driven not by ideals or philosophy, but by naked political calculation.  The American presence in Afghanistan is indefensible, and surely Obama knows that.  Not even with his vaunted oratorical skills can he provide a coherent explanation for the Afghan war that doesn't fall apart even as it's uttered.  But the political costs and risks of ending the American involvement in Afghanistan are undoubtedly much higher than those associated with a few hundred billion dollars and a few hundred young American lives lost every year.  It would take substantial political courage to end the American involvement in Afghanistan, certainly, but we can now rest assured that whatever else he might have, Barack Obama does not have that courage.

...