New General, Same Problem for Obama in Afghanistan
Barack Obama, as candidate and president, in effect created the IED known as Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Now that improvised explosive device has blown up in the midst of the Obama presidency. The damage is severe, if not crippling.
At the White House, President Barack Obama announces Gen. David Petraeus as the new commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan., Charles Dharapak / AP
Barack Obama, as candidate and president, in effect created the IED known as Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Now that improvised explosive device has blown up in the midst of the Obama presidency. The damage is severe, if not crippling.
By relieving McChrystal of command and replacing him with Gen. David Petraeus, the president sought to shield himself from the blast. "This is a change in personnel, but it's not a change in policy," he said from the Rose Garden on Wednesday.
But by focusing his military answer to Islamist extremism on the ungovernable and impenetrable mountains of Afghanistan, Obama made the rise of a man like McChrystal not only possible, but inevitable.
An impossible-to-govern country, infested for millennia with hard-eyed tribal warriors, gave rise to an impossible-to-govern American general surrounded by an inner circle of hard-eyed tribal warriors.
To paraphrase screenwriter David Mamet, in McChrystal, in Afghanistan, we became what we beheld.
The war in Afghanistan, now the longest in the nation’s history, has cost 1,000 American lives and soon will have cost $1 trillion. And yet we have not defeated, let alone eradicated, the militant Islamist Taliban, which harbored and encouraged the terrorists who attacked on September 11, 2001.
In the meantime, voters have turned against the war. In the first months of his presidency, Obama’s policy of focusing militarily on Afghanistan had wide support. By a 56–41 percent margin, Americans said that the war there was worth fighting.
Now that sentiment is reversed in the latest sample of the same Washington Post poll: by a 53–44 percent margin, voters say the war is not worth fighting.
As a candidate for president, Obama declared that the war in Iraq was a catastrophic and unnecessary “war of choice,” but that Afghanistan was the real, indispensable, and pivotal “war of necessity.”
He evidently believed this—even though he had never been to Afghanistan, knew little about military history, and knew little about the region aside from a college-year trip through Pakistan in 1981 and a quick trip as a junior senator to Iraq in 2006.
But candidate Obama also had a political motive: to outflank the hawkish Sen. Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries, and to prove to the rest of the country that he yearned to defeat Muslim extremists and that he was applying his considerable intellect to the role of commander in chief.
As president, Obama had to make good on his promise. And, fatefully, he chose McChrystal’s “counterinsurgency” theory of how to eradicate the Taliban. It stresses combining overwhelming on-the-ground force with an amped-up effort to win hearts and minds—and gives the Pentagon the main role in military, diplomatic, and political matters.
In essence, by choosing McChrystal’s way, the president was giving even more power to a Pentagon that this year is expected to have at least a $700 billion budget—more than 10 times that of the State Department.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has gone along with the project, but Vice President Joe Biden—who might have been secretary of state had the cards fallen in a slightly different way—has not. Divisions within the administration grow by the day.
And Obama also is presiding over an unpopular war and a fractured administration at a critical time on the real battlefield. The long-planned and oft-delayed siege of Kandahar was supposed to start soon—with McChrystal in charge—but has been delayed. It has been touted as the pivotal battle in a pivotal war.
But at the same time, the president remains publicly committed to beginning the withdrawal of the 94,000 American troops in Afghanistan by July 2011.
Who can win in Kandahar so that we can begin to leave, and America will be rid of the Taliban and its allies?
That is—or was supposed to be—Gen. Stanley McChrystal.
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Howard Fineman is Newsweek's Senior Washington Correspondent and Columnist, senior editor and deputy Washington bureau chief. He is the author of "Living Politics," a column that began on MSNBC.COM and Newsweek.com and that now also appears in the print magazine. An award-winning reporter and writer, Fineman also is an analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, appearing regularly on "Countdown with Keith Olbermann," "Hardball with Chris Matthews" and "TODAY." The author of scores of Newsweek cover stories, Fineman's work has appeared as well in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The New Republic. His 2008 national best-selling book, "The Thirteen American Arguments," was released in paperback by Random House in the spring of 2009.
One of the nation's leading political reporters, Fineman has interviewed every major presidential candidate from (then-vice president) George H.W. Bush in 1985 to (then senator) Barack Obama early and often in the 2008 campaign cycle. His current work focuses on the Obama Administration and its top officials, as well as on Congress and politics throughout the country. Although based in Washington, Fineman travels widely in the U.S. and has covered politics and other events in 49 of the 50 states.
Fineman's work has produced many milestones and awards. A cover story in November 2001 featured President George W. Bush's first extensive interview after 9/11. Another cover, "Bush and God," was part of a series of articles that won the 2003 National Magazine Award for General Excellence. His reporting has helped Newsweek win many honors from the Magazine Publishers Association and the American Journalism Review. Other awards include a "Page One" from the Headliners Club of New York, a "Silver Gavel" from the American Bar Association and a "Deadline Club" from the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ). In 2006 he received the Alumni Award from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.
As a reporter and writer, Fineman ranges widely. Besides campaign-year covers, other projects have included: race and politics, the impact of digital technology on society, the influence of Hollywood on politics, the rise of the religious right and of conservative talk radio. He has interviewed business leaders such as George Soros, Bill Gates, Steve Case and Robert Rubin and entertainment figures such as Warren Beatty, Jane Fonda and Jay Leno.
Although now under exclusive television contract to NBC, Fineman over the years has appeared on major public affairs shows, such as Nightline, Face the Nation, Fox News Sunday, Larry King Live, Charlie Rose and the NewsHour. He was a regular panelist on Washington Week in Review on PBS (1983-95) and on CNN's Capital Gang Sunday (1995-98). He worked with Ted Koppel on Nightline specials, and has been a guest on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and "The Colbert Report."
A native of Pittsburgh, Fineman began his career at The Courier-Journal in Louisville, covering the environment, the coal industry and state politics before joining the newspaper's Washington bureau in 1978. He moved to Newsweek in 1980, was named chief political correspondent in 1984, deputy Washington bureau chief in 1993, senior editor in 1995 and senior Washington correspondent and columnist in 2008.
Fineman holds an A.B., Phi Beta Kappa, from Colgate, an M.S. in journalism from Columbia and a J.D. from the Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville. His legal education included a year as a visiting student at the Georgetown University Law Center. He received Watson and Pultizer Traveling Fellowships for study in Europe, Russia and the Middle East, and has traveled to more than 40 countries, among them China, Vietnam, Japan, Ukraine, Israel, Turkey and the West Bank Palestinian Territories.
Fineman is married to Amy L. Nathan, a senior counsel at the Federal Communications Commission. They live in Washington with their two children, Meredith and Nicholas.
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