Today’s rumbles of dissent could become tomorrow’s mass protests. And, as news reports have noted, there are uncomfortable parallels between Obama in Afghanistan and Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam, where a popular president with an ambitious domestic agenda found himself bogged down in his predecessor’s escalating war.
Obama's Democratic Backlash Over Afghanistan
by Benjamin Sarlin
As President Obama’s generals consider asking for more troops in Afghanistan, the White House is finding itself confronted with a new problem: lefty war critics. They aren’t fringe figures, either. The latest eminences to ask tough questions about the dramatic shift in Afghanistan policy include Rory Stewart, the best-selling author; filmmaker Robert Greenwald; even Obama’s own advisor Lee Hamilton, the former vice-chairman of the 9/11 Commission. While not a coordinated movement, these early rumblings of skepticism could gain momentum over time, providing yet another headache for Obama.
“Certainly we need to look much, much more broadly at our strategic interests and realize Afghanistan is one problem among many and we simply can’t put all our money and all our troops in that particular basket,” Stewart, the director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, told The Daily Beast.
Stewart added, “It doesn’t make any strategic sense at all to keep pumping these troops and resources into this one problematic area when there are more problematic areas of the world—Pakistan alone is 20 times more problematic.”
Former Rep. Lee Hamilton caused a stir last week with an op-ed suggesting that the U.S. would have to accept some Taliban presence in Afghanistan and that waning public approval of the war was an “important factor” in the war’s sustainability. He concluded with a loaded yet open-ended question: “is this type of war really the best use of American power and resources in today’s world?”
Afghanistan veteran Andrew Exum, who runs the popular blog Abu Muqawama, recently began a feature on his site asking his readers to give their best answer to the same question.
The most vocal skeptics so far of the new Afghanistan policy are mostly left-of-center and largely confined to wonkish circles. There is little grassroots activity aimed at blocking a troop buildup, let alone exiting entirely (director Robert Greenwald’s Rethink Afghanistan film series is an exception). Nonetheless, top members of the Obama administration have acknowledged that time might be limited to get things right. Last month, Defense Secretary Robert Gates predicted that policy-makers needed to show progress within one year or risk cratering public support.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-08-17/why-are-we-in-afghanistan/?cid=hp:beastoriginalsL1
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