Should Obama actually change his mind about Afghanistan, our elite journalists -- obsessed as they are with how the game is played -- will almost inevitably characterize this as vacillation and declare it a sign of political weakness. But that really misses the point. Full Story »
Posted by Derek Hawkins - via Real Clear Politics, Patrick Ruffini
Froomkin touches on something deeper than the imending "shift" in Obama's Afghan strategy: this piece says as much, if not more about the president's decision making process. Rather than approach foreign policy with an ideological framework, Froomkin says, Obama seems willing to make substantial changes based on new information. A simple point, but not what we see from a class of pundits coming off eight years covering a predecessor who did things much differently. Very well reasoned and contextualized -- some fresh insights.
The most important thing to keep in mind here is that over the last several months, what’s emerged when it comes to Afghan policy is a sort of consensus of the realists — from across the political spectrum. The consensus: That our national interests in Afghanistan are pretty limited and that the harder we try to change things over there, the more resistance we face; that Afghanistan, after eight years of U.S. occupation, has become a Vietnam-like quagmire where escalation only leads to more escalation, not victory; and that what little we could possibly accomplish there is not worth more American blood.
The most troubling question an Obama change of mind would raise is why he advocated such a bombastic approach to Afghanistan in the first place, starting back when he was campaigning for office. What didn’t he understand at the time? Was he getting bad advice? Or was it a purely political stratagem to insulate him from being attacked as a peacenik? If so, at what cost? And whose cost? And why did he actually up the rhetorical ante less than two months ago, telling the Veterans of Foreign Wars that this was a “war of necessity”? Yes, the recent Afghan elections, marked by widespread fraud, produced powerful evidence that there will be no strong, reliable central government in that country anytime in the foreseeable future. But was that really the inflection point? So if Obama changes course, we should well ask: What took him so long?
I'm with Froomkin. After eight long years with a president who let dogma drive his foreign policy decisions, I'm more than grateful to see shrewd, calculated realism has returned to the White House. (I had similar words about McCain when he vacillated on a couple issues during his campaign.) To be sure, however, such realism has its downsides: Obama's fumbling of health care reform, in my opinion, was the result of *over*-calculation, a kind of paranoia about being unable to please all parties at the negotiating table.