ShareThisAs President Barack Obama pursues his deliberately paced effort to forge the first comprehensive Afghanistan/Pakistan strategy after eight years of wandering war, Washington is taking it all calmly in stride.
Not. The capital is all atwitter (see also: a'Twitter). Critics, gleefully unwilling to wait for the decision, are bemoaning "indecision." Meanwhile everyone is playing the city's favorite game: Guess Which Insider Will Win.
Q: Will Obama follow the advice of Biden, Gates, Clinton or McChrystal/Petraeus?
A: The correct answer seems to be: Yogi Berra.
"When you come to a fork in the road, take it," the Hall of Fame philosopher-catcher once famously advised. That looks increasingly like Obama's new strategy: A two-track approach against the now-formidable Taliban in Afghanistan, the ever-formidable Taliban in Pakistan -- and their al-Qaida allies.
That two-track anti-Taliban approach is occurring already.
Pakistan's military just launched a full-scale offensive against Taliban forces inside Pakistan's semi-autonomous tribal lands of South Waziristan -- something U.S. officials have urged for years. America is believed to be providing surveillance and support. Pakistan's military finally acted after being shocked by recent well-coordinated Taliban attacks, including capturing a military headquarters. Now fearful, Pakistan's leaders realized they faced a perilous future. Indeed, the prospect of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal controlled by Islamic militants produced a world of fear.
Ironically, while Taliban forces in Pakistan are under full-scale attack, Vice President Joseph Biden is urging U.S. forces to cease attacks on the stronger-than-ever Taliban forces next door in Afghanistan. Biden favors large troop withdrawals and shifting from a counter-insurgency strategy against the Taliban to a counter-terror strategy, with U.S. forces mainly attacking al-Qaida cells in Afghanistan. He favors using U.S. troops to train Afghanistan's military. However, it is far from certain that Afghan forces will be able to defeat the Taliban in the foreseeable future.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, is pressing the opposite approach. He wants 40,000 more troops -- and more importantly, he recommended a combined military, diplomatic and development-aid offensive to convince Afghanis that a Taliban regime will never be in their best interests.
Last March, Obama rejected Biden's approach and we have seen nothing to indicate Obama will reverse himself and adopt Biden's plan now. But the president has insisted on examining a wide range of options between the Biden and McChrystal approaches.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who strongly opposed Biden's idea last March, has said recently that not all Taliban followers are militant zealots -- that some fight for the Taliban simply because they are being paid to do it and cannot find another job that pays that well. She has noted correctly the key to the so-called Iraq "surge" wasn't the increased troops but that Sunni insurgents were given $300 a month to switch and fight alongside U.S.-supported local security forces.
McChrystal reportedly handed his commander-in-chief a series of options, with estimates of positive and negative risks for each. Obama is right to drill through each option and risk now -- and challenge the assumptions behind each to assure that for once we get it right. Obama is doing what Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon failed to do in Vietnam; and what George W. Bush failed to do in Afghanistan and Iraq -- know the real range of anticipated outcomes and options before ordering U.S. troops into battle.
Obama faces one tough truth. In Vietnam, America propped up a corrupt, unpopular government -- a regime so bad that many Vietnamese didn't care who won that war. Afghan President Hamid Karzai's regime is certifiably worse -- it just ran a United Nations-certified fraudulent election and is blatantly corrupt.
America's hearts-and-minds goal in Afghanistan must be to convince an uncertain people that Taliban rule will be worse for them. America and our allies need no convincing. We have seen, all too painfully, that it will put our world at risk.
(Martin Schram writes political analysis for Scripps Howard News Service. E-mail him at martin.schram(at)gmail.com.)
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