Into the Quagmire

There are two good reads on the McChrystal appointment and the President’s wholesale plunge into the Afghanistan quagmire, one from Tom Engelhardt at Tom Dispatch and the other by Alexander Cockburn. They both make pretty much the same points that I made in my latest post, Engelhardt more studiously and Cockburn more polemically.

Cockburn is especially strong in comparing the seeming transformation of Obama to the warlike about-faces of JFK and Jimmy Carter. Engelhardt shows exceptional insight into the inevitable outcomes of this sort of escalation, as well as a fine critique of the loyal camp-followers of the mainstream press, who simply love the General.

To quote from the Tom Dispatch article:

“For those old enough to remember, we've been here before. Administrations that start down a path of expansion in such a war find themselves strangely locked in -- psychically, if nothing else -- if things don't work out as expected and the situation continues to deteriorate. In Vietnam, the result was escalation without end. President Obama and his foreign policy team now seem locked into an expanding war. Despite the fact that the application of force has not only failed for years, but actually fed that expansion, they also seem to be locked into a policy of applying ever greater force, with the goal of, as the Post's Ignatius puts it, cracking the "Taliban coalition" and bringing elements of it to the bargaining table.

So keep an eye out for whatever goes wrong, as it most certainly will, and then for the pressures on Washington to respond with further expansions of what is already "Obama's war." With McChrystal in charge in Afghanistan, for instance, it seems reasonable to assume that the urge to sanction new special forces raids into Pakistan will grow. After all, frustration in Washington is already building, for however much the Pakistani military may be taking on the Taliban in Swat or Buner, don't expect its military or civilian leaders to be terribly interested in what happens near the Afghan border.

As Tony Karon of the Rootless Cosmopolitan blog puts the matter: "The current military campaign is designed to enforce a limit on the Taliban's reach within Pakistan, confining it to the movement's heartland." And that heartland is the Afghan border region. For one thing, the Pakistani military (and the country's intelligence services, which essentially brought the Taliban into being long ago) are focused on India. They want a Pashtun ally across the border, Taliban or otherwise, where they fear the Indians are making inroads.”

But here’s the problem. Aside from a few lefties in the blogosphere and several lonely voices in Congress, there is no real peace movement, or anti-imperialist movement, to put it more precisely. Nor is there a serious appreciation of the sheer idiocy and simple-mindedness of the War on Terror consensus. So there is no pressure for Congressmen to resist these disastrous initiatives. Even if there were, I doubt they could be successful at this juncture.

And this is the real problem, and yet another reason to postulate that the American political system is broken, probably beyond repair. We shall continue to dash off on these fool’s errands and adventures, wasting our resources and all the hopes and idealism the nation can muster until we are finally ruined in the process. Right now seems to me a turning point for the administration, and the chances of success are virtually non-existent.