Afghanistan: Obama stays the course
Saturday, 10 July 2010
THE dismissal of General Stanley McChrystal as the US and NATO commander in Kabul has apparently improved the credentials of Barack Obama as a war president. A Newsweek poll shows that the majority of the Americans supported the president on this issue by a 50/35 margin. The same poll, though, shows that 53 per cent of those surveyed disapprove of the way the president is handling the Afghan war. More disquieting for Obama is that nearly 60 per cent of likely American voters, according to a new Rasmussen opinion poll, say either the US cannot win the Afghan war or that they are not sure it can. An earlier poll by ABC & the Washington Post found that 53 per cent of Americans think ‘the war is not worth its cost’. On the other side of the Atlantic, in Great Britain, America’s biggest ally in the Afghan war, a BBC poll in February said that 64 per cent of British people think that the war is ‘unwinnable.’
In the battleground, too, hardly anything is happening to cheer Obama. In the annals of the Afghan war, June past will be remembered not only for the wayward behaviour of General Chrystal but also as the deadliest month for the US and its allies since the war began in 2001. At least 102 coalition troops were killed in the month compared to the previous highest monthly total of 76 in August 2009. Besides, the war efforts of the Americans and their allies have suffered setbacks. The much-trumpeted offensive in Kandahar is going badly. In the extended war theatre, in Pakistan, which has been fighting a proxy war for America since the Obama administration re-christened the Afghan war as AfPak war in 2009, South Waziristan and the Swat valley have seen the return of the Taleban and their kindred fighters, forcing the Pak army to reopen campaigns.
On the political front, the situation is possibly more murky than it is in the battleground. President Hamid Karzai, who was hand-picked by America as the leader of Afghanistan, has quite often been critical of Washington since his re-election in a controversy-ridden 2009 presidential election. Karzai is known to have opened his own channel of negotiations with the Talebans. Washington and Islamabad are engaged in polemics on the issues of Osama bin-Laden and the conduct of the war in Pakistan territories.
How much critical public opinion in the US, UK and in the rest of the world may be or how bad may go the war at the moment or how confusing may be the current political outlook in Kabul and Islamabad, President Obama has decided to stay the course. While announcing, on June 24, the dismissal of General Chrystal and replacing him with General David H. Petraeus as the commander of the coalition operations in Afghanistan – the US-led Operation Enduring Freedom and the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) –– the president re-affirmed that the Afghan war strategy, including the surge of troops and the July 2011 deadline for the beginning of withdrawal, would remain unchanged.
The change of commander in Afghanistan is primarily an exercise in bringing discipline in the military. On assuming the command on Sunday, General Petraeus confirmed this when he said: “My assumption of command represents a change in personnel, not a change in policy or strategy”. The dismissal of General Chrystal and the appointment of General Petraeus as Obama’s commander in Afghanistan have little significance in the context of the strategy and tactics of the Afghan war. America thus continues to pass through “a time of great trial”, as Obama himself warned in his ‘Address to the Nation on the Way Forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan’ delivered at the US Military Academy at West Point in December 2009.
In the battleground, too, hardly anything is happening to cheer Obama. In the annals of the Afghan war, June past will be remembered not only for the wayward behaviour of General Chrystal but also as the deadliest month for the US and its allies since the war began in 2001. At least 102 coalition troops were killed in the month compared to the previous highest monthly total of 76 in August 2009. Besides, the war efforts of the Americans and their allies have suffered setbacks. The much-trumpeted offensive in Kandahar is going badly. In the extended war theatre, in Pakistan, which has been fighting a proxy war for America since the Obama administration re-christened the Afghan war as AfPak war in 2009, South Waziristan and the Swat valley have seen the return of the Taleban and their kindred fighters, forcing the Pak army to reopen campaigns.
On the political front, the situation is possibly more murky than it is in the battleground. President Hamid Karzai, who was hand-picked by America as the leader of Afghanistan, has quite often been critical of Washington since his re-election in a controversy-ridden 2009 presidential election. Karzai is known to have opened his own channel of negotiations with the Talebans. Washington and Islamabad are engaged in polemics on the issues of Osama bin-Laden and the conduct of the war in Pakistan territories.
How much critical public opinion in the US, UK and in the rest of the world may be or how bad may go the war at the moment or how confusing may be the current political outlook in Kabul and Islamabad, President Obama has decided to stay the course. While announcing, on June 24, the dismissal of General Chrystal and replacing him with General David H. Petraeus as the commander of the coalition operations in Afghanistan – the US-led Operation Enduring Freedom and the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) –– the president re-affirmed that the Afghan war strategy, including the surge of troops and the July 2011 deadline for the beginning of withdrawal, would remain unchanged.
The change of commander in Afghanistan is primarily an exercise in bringing discipline in the military. On assuming the command on Sunday, General Petraeus confirmed this when he said: “My assumption of command represents a change in personnel, not a change in policy or strategy”. The dismissal of General Chrystal and the appointment of General Petraeus as Obama’s commander in Afghanistan have little significance in the context of the strategy and tactics of the Afghan war. America thus continues to pass through “a time of great trial”, as Obama himself warned in his ‘Address to the Nation on the Way Forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan’ delivered at the US Military Academy at West Point in December 2009.