Obama, JFK and Afghanistan

Frank Rich compares President Obama's deliberations on how to respond to the McChrystal report on Afghanistan to John F. Kennedy's decision not to send combat troops to Vietnam in The New York Times.

Though Kennedy was outnumbered in his own White House — and though he had once called Vietnam “the cornerstone of the free world in Southeast Asia” — he ultimately refused to authorize combat troops. He instead limited America’s military role to advisory missions. That policy, set in November 1961, would only be reversed, to tragic ends, after his death. As Bundy wrote in a memo that year, the new president had learned the hard way, from the Bay of Pigs disaster in April, that he “must second-guess even military plans.” Or, as Goldstein crystallizes the overall lesson of J.F.K.’s lonely call on Vietnam strategy: “Counselors advise but presidents decide.”

Obama finds himself at that same lonely decision point now. Though he came to the presidency declaring Afghanistan a “war of necessity,” circumstances have since changed. While the Taliban thrives there, Al Qaeda’s ground zero is next-door in nuclear-armed Pakistan. Last month’s blatantly corrupt, and arguably stolen, Afghanistan election ended any pretense that Hamid Karzai is a credible counter to the Taliban or a legitimate partner for America in a counterinsurgency project of enormous risk and cost. Indeed, Karzai, whose brother is a reputed narcotics trafficker, is a double for Ngo Dinh Diem, the corrupt South Vietnamese president whose brother also presided over a vast, government-sanctioned criminal enterprise in the early 1960s. And unlike Kennedy, whose C.I.A. helped take out the Diem brothers, Obama doesn’t have a coup in his toolbox.

Rich boils Obama's dilemma down by asking "even if we routed the Taliban in another decade or two, after countless casualties and billions of dollars, how would that stop Al Qaeda from coalescing in Somalia or some other criminal host state?" He notes that Vice President Joe Biden is playing the role of JFK's George Ball in dissenting with McChrystal and advocating a scaled-down special operations force focused on fighting al Qaeda.

Rory Stewart, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University and a former British soldier and foreign service officer, endorsed Biden's idea on a recent appearance on Bill Moyers' Journal.

I would have thought what you needed from point of view of Al Qaeda counterterrorism is probably 10-20,000 special forces and intelligence operatives. Doing pretty much what they've been doing quite successfully over the last seven, eight years. People are saying we've failed in the counterterrorism objective, of course, we haven't really. Osama Bin Laden isn't in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda hasn't got bases in Afghanistan. And I think we could continue to ensure that was the case.

We need to distinguish between Taliban and Al Qaeda. The answer is, of course, if we reduce the troop numbers, the Taliban presence, particularly in the areas where they have a lot of support would grow. And that is a risk. And that's a problem...But we cannot try to write a blank check. If we go for sort of all-or-nothing approach, I think we're going to end up abandoning the country in five years time, being less kind than we would the other way. So, distinguish Taliban from Al Qaeda. The Taliban, broadly speaking, are Afghans — farmers, subsistence farmers. As I say, most of those people can't find the United States on the map. Al Qaeda, traditionally, are much more educated, middle-class people, often from Egypt, from Saudi Arabia, North Africa. People who have masters degrees, who've lived in Hamburg, who learned to fly airplanes. We can't confuse those two. There's no point us getting into a fight with six million Afghans when our real target is probably a few hundred terrorists who have the capacity to harm the United States. Our real issue is not who wants to harm the United States — our real issue is who can. And how do we prevent those people who actually have that ability to do that.

--Ballard Burgher