E.J. Dionne: Obama's Third Way in Afghanistan
[E.J. Dionne is a twice-weekly columnist for The Post, writing on national policy and politics. He is a University Professor at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution.]
When there is no good solution to a problem, a president has three options. One is to avoid the problem. The second is to pick the least bad of the available options. The third is to mix and match among the proposed solutions and minimize the long-term damage any decision will cause.
Afghanistan has presented President Barack Obama with exactly this situation, and he is soon likely to settle on something closest to the third approach. This will make no one very happy. Yet it might be the least dangerous choice.
If we wanted to be successful in Afghanistan, we wouldn’t choose to start from where we are now. We wouldn’t have put this war on the back burner for so long, and we would have dealt much earlier with the debilitating deficiencies of President Hamid Karzai’s government.
Obama can change none of this. And unlike enthusiasts for an all-out counterinsurgency strategy, Obama knows he has to make a decision that’s sustainable over the long run, which means taking into account domestic economic and political realities...
... The president has decided that Afghanistan is neither Iraq nor Vietnam. This is a view that puts him at odds with both the hawks, who constantly use the 2007 Iraq surge metaphor, and the doves, who constantly look to Vietnam as a cautionary tale.
Obama insists that a surge in Afghanistan cannot work in the same way it did in Iraq because conditions on the ground are so different. Yet in the wake of 9/11, he sees the United States as having vital interests in Afghanistan that it did not have in Vietnam: the need to defeat terrorists in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to be mindful about the impact of our choices on the future of Pakistan.
No issue has presented a tougher test for Obama’s non-ideological pragmatism than Afghanistan. Those with the greatest political stake in the debate reject the middle ground and doubt the president can think his way around the all-in-or-all-out dilemma. Yet this is exactly the kind of thinking Obama promised last year, and he’s right to try to make it work.
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When there is no good solution to a problem, a president has three options. One is to avoid the problem. The second is to pick the least bad of the available options. The third is to mix and match among the proposed solutions and minimize the long-term damage any decision will cause.
Afghanistan has presented President Barack Obama with exactly this situation, and he is soon likely to settle on something closest to the third approach. This will make no one very happy. Yet it might be the least dangerous choice.
If we wanted to be successful in Afghanistan, we wouldn’t choose to start from where we are now. We wouldn’t have put this war on the back burner for so long, and we would have dealt much earlier with the debilitating deficiencies of President Hamid Karzai’s government.
Obama can change none of this. And unlike enthusiasts for an all-out counterinsurgency strategy, Obama knows he has to make a decision that’s sustainable over the long run, which means taking into account domestic economic and political realities...
... The president has decided that Afghanistan is neither Iraq nor Vietnam. This is a view that puts him at odds with both the hawks, who constantly use the 2007 Iraq surge metaphor, and the doves, who constantly look to Vietnam as a cautionary tale.
Obama insists that a surge in Afghanistan cannot work in the same way it did in Iraq because conditions on the ground are so different. Yet in the wake of 9/11, he sees the United States as having vital interests in Afghanistan that it did not have in Vietnam: the need to defeat terrorists in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to be mindful about the impact of our choices on the future of Pakistan.
No issue has presented a tougher test for Obama’s non-ideological pragmatism than Afghanistan. Those with the greatest political stake in the debate reject the middle ground and doubt the president can think his way around the all-in-or-all-out dilemma. Yet this is exactly the kind of thinking Obama promised last year, and he’s right to try to make it work.