Afghanistan: from headlines to frontlines

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Hot on the heels of a recently-released report in which Afghanistan commander General McChrystal said the U.S. mission in Afghanistan “will likely result in failure” without calling up additional troops, President Obama hit the talk show circuit expressing concern about sending more troops. He made it clear that he was still weighing his options:

“There are those who argue that now’s the time to completely pull out of Afghanistan — there are coherent arguments for that; but there are enormous risks involved in that,” said President Obama. “There are those who say let’s double down and put more troops in Afghanistan — there are good arguments for that; but also enormous risks. So, one of the things that I’ve discovered about being president is that, if there was an easy answer, then somebody would have solved it and it wouldn’t get to your desk.”

Kristen L. Rouse is a first lieutenant in the Army National Guard and recently found out she would be deployed for a second tour in Afghanistan. She feels President Obama needs to take the time to reassess the strategy for Afghanistan.

“It’s a difficult challenge that lies ahead, and I’m very proud to be a part of the changing Afghanistan policy,” she said. “President Obama gave General McChrystal the task of assessing what had been going for the last eight years in Afghanistan and he took, I believe it was either 60 or 90 days to complete that assessment; and now President Obama needs time to assess that assessment and to make a rational decision on what troops we’re going to place in harm’s way.”

Rouse added that she was glad Afghanistan has become a public debate, “… because for most of those eight years that we’ve been in Afghanistan, there has not been intensive public debate over what troops are doing in Afghanistan and what troop levels are.”

She credits that to the Iraq War, and believes that while Iraq was important, it “eclipsed” the mission in Afghanistan, which was constrained by limited resources.

“It’s called an ‘economy of force’ type of conflict,” said Rouse. “And so I think that what General McChrystal, and what I hope President Obama are doing is looking at what is the mission at hand and how can we scale the resources to that. That’s a whole new way of thinking as far as the way that we have been executing policy in Afghanistan.”  

Polls show that the American public’s support for the war is dropping, which is an added complication for President Obama.

Rouse shared her personal view on US efforts in Afghanistan:

“As a private citizen, I’d like to say that I really believe that stabilizing Afghanistan, providing that government with legitimate outreach and infrastructure and the ability to provide its own security: that does have a tangible effect on our national security.

“And I also think we have a moral obligation to fulfill the promises that we’ve made to the Afghan people. I think that Afghanistan is a profoundly impoverished nation that has suffered from thirty years of warfare. Our country has been intimately involved throughout those thirty years, in funding different levels of the conflict, whether that be the mujahideen against the Soviets … that’s a separate discussion, but we have been involved. We’re a country of moral upstanding people with a lot of resource … I personally believe that we need to make good on our involvement and the promises that we’ve made there.

Larry Korb is former Assistant Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan, and now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a senior advisor for the Center for Defense Information.

He thinks President Obama will have to work hard to build public support for whatever course of action he takes. “If he wants to go ahead and accomplish what he had set out as his objectives, he’s going to have to do almost what he did on healthcare and give a speech to the American people and explain to them a couple of things.

“First of all, yeah we’ve been there for a long time but we haven’t been doing what we should have in Afghanistan. Both General McChrystal’s predecessors … asked for more troops and they didn’t get them. The Bush administration was so focused on Iraq and President Bush thought things were going very well in Afghanistan. He didn’t realize until 2008 how bad things were.

“The other is to keep in mind that people are talking about more troops … Obama’s already doubled the number of troops. I think people forget that when he came in there were roughly about 30,000 troops and close to 70,000 now with the decisions he’s made already. So it’s not as if he’s till weighing to send more troops; the question is, do you send even more … and what is your objective.”

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