Con Coughlin: Barack Obama must stop dithering – or Afghanistan will be his Vietnam
[Con Coughlin is an expert on international terrorism and the Middle East; with the benefit of 25 years in foreign journalism, he deftly scrutinises world affairs.]
In my experience, you generally know the game is up when the United Nations orders its employees to start packing their bags and head for the nearest functioning airport. In any conflict, it falls to the UN to occupy the moral high ground and concentrate its efforts on alleviating the suffering of the victims of war, rather than siding with the combatants. But the moment security becomes so perilous that it is no longer safe to offer basic humanitarian aid, you know things are getting pretty serious.
We can all remember what happened in Darfur when the UN was powerless to protect millions of Sudanese refugees from the genocidal attentions of the Janjaweed militia. And looking back at the post-Saddam implosion of Iraq, it now seems abundantly clear that the tipping point in the coalition's disastrous attempts to maintain some semblance of order came when the UN ordered its staff to withdraw after a devastating suicide bomb attack on its Baghdad headquarters in August 2003, in which 22 people were killed.
Yesterday's decision by the UN to undertake a similar withdrawal from Afghanistan, following an attack on the accommodation used by its employees, certainly does not bode well for the Nato-led mission to establish some form of credible governance in this benighted country...
... In Washington, meanwhile, President Obama and his senior aides are so traumatised by the thought that the Afghan campaign might become their Vietnam that they seem to have totally lost the will to lead. While Mr Obama, by all accounts, spends his evenings poring over improving tomes such as Lessons in Disaster – Gordon Goldstein's sobering study of the appalling decision-making process in the Kennedy and Johnson White Houses – his administration appears incapable of making any decisions of its own, particularly concerning the controversial issue of whether or not to send more troops to Afghanistan.
This endless dithering prompted General Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank, the former head of Britain's Armed Forces, to accuse the president of being responsible for the crisis of confidence that threatens to jeopardise the success of the entire Afghan mission. "We've reached a tipping point in Afghanistan because of President Obama's delayed decision to send more troops," he bluntly declared...
... To achieve both these goals, the Nato mission desperately needs more resources. If they are not forthcoming soon, Mr Obama will experience the same fate in Afghanistan as his Democratic predecessors endured in Vietnam.
Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)
In my experience, you generally know the game is up when the United Nations orders its employees to start packing their bags and head for the nearest functioning airport. In any conflict, it falls to the UN to occupy the moral high ground and concentrate its efforts on alleviating the suffering of the victims of war, rather than siding with the combatants. But the moment security becomes so perilous that it is no longer safe to offer basic humanitarian aid, you know things are getting pretty serious.
We can all remember what happened in Darfur when the UN was powerless to protect millions of Sudanese refugees from the genocidal attentions of the Janjaweed militia. And looking back at the post-Saddam implosion of Iraq, it now seems abundantly clear that the tipping point in the coalition's disastrous attempts to maintain some semblance of order came when the UN ordered its staff to withdraw after a devastating suicide bomb attack on its Baghdad headquarters in August 2003, in which 22 people were killed.
Yesterday's decision by the UN to undertake a similar withdrawal from Afghanistan, following an attack on the accommodation used by its employees, certainly does not bode well for the Nato-led mission to establish some form of credible governance in this benighted country...
... In Washington, meanwhile, President Obama and his senior aides are so traumatised by the thought that the Afghan campaign might become their Vietnam that they seem to have totally lost the will to lead. While Mr Obama, by all accounts, spends his evenings poring over improving tomes such as Lessons in Disaster – Gordon Goldstein's sobering study of the appalling decision-making process in the Kennedy and Johnson White Houses – his administration appears incapable of making any decisions of its own, particularly concerning the controversial issue of whether or not to send more troops to Afghanistan.
This endless dithering prompted General Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank, the former head of Britain's Armed Forces, to accuse the president of being responsible for the crisis of confidence that threatens to jeopardise the success of the entire Afghan mission. "We've reached a tipping point in Afghanistan because of President Obama's delayed decision to send more troops," he bluntly declared...
... To achieve both these goals, the Nato mission desperately needs more resources. If they are not forthcoming soon, Mr Obama will experience the same fate in Afghanistan as his Democratic predecessors endured in Vietnam.