Speech Not Perfect But The Plan Is Sound

December 09, 2009
By Mike Littwin
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The Denver Post

(AP) - If there’s one thing that was clear in President Barack Obama’s speech, it’s that he wasn’t auditioning to be the next war president.

We know what wartime speeches sound like, and this wasn’t it.

Obama’s speech at West Point was not a call to arms, even though he announced he would send 30,000 additional troops there. It was not a call for national sacrifice. It was not a call to save the world for democracy or even to save Afghanistan from its own demons.

There was a reason for the lack of soaring rhetoric. Rhetoric comes easy when you want to take a country to war. But it becomes a little harder when you’re looking for a way to end a war, particularly one that most of the country has long since grown weary of fighting.

This wasn’t Obama’s finest speech, although he was eloquent enough, particularly when speaking of the troops he would send to war. But if it wasn’t his finest hour, that may have been because it was one of his most difficult ones.

What Obama had to do was to try to make the best of a terrible situation. He offered a novel idea - sending more troops to Afghanistan in order to facilitate getting the troops out - but not exactly an idealistic one.

This was Obama as a different kind of dreamer, one who announced, in a single speech, an escalation of a war and also a timeline for which the war would begin to end.

I’m sure this has never been tried before. Many of the pundits were quick to say that he was giving away the game before it had even begun.

And yet, Obama looked as calm as ever on the stage. The country may have teetered toward economic crisis as Obama took office. He may have had two wars with which to contend. Even as he spoke, he was fighting for his political life to get 60 votes in the Senate for health care reform, and the unemployment rate is above 10 percent. No wonder Obama said that the nation he most wants to build is the one at home.

But if Obama’s poll numbers are slipping, you shouldn’t question whether he’s lost any of his confidence. The speech, in concept anyway, was stunning.

Here’s the case Obama made: We can’t stay in Afghanistan forever. And those who think we should leave now - including many in his own party - should take a look at the disaster, he said, that is waiting to happen.

He made the case, an easy one to make, that the Taliban could retake Afghanistan and that al-Qaida, in its weakened state, would gladly come back from hiding out in the tribal areas of Pakistan.

The problem in Afghanistan is not just the old one, learned by the Soviet Union in one century and England in another, of being the place where - to cite the cliche - empires go to die. The problem, in this case, has been many years of neglect.

Obama didn’t waste much time in his speech discussing President George W. Bush’s decision to turn his focus from Afghanistan to Iraq, but he took just enough. The real war, Obama had argued during the campaign, was always in Afghanistan. We’re there eight years after we began - and still with no exit strategy.

The Taliban have come back in force. The Taliban are also in force across the border in Pakistan. Afghan President Hamid Karzai, meanwhile, has won an election that everyone assumes was corrupt in a country where corruption flowers like so many poppies.

What to do? As Obama said, we could pull out now. Or we could stay, with the same number of troops, and never make any progress. Or Afghanistan could turn into the well-known quagmire, in which more troops replace more troops who replace more troops.

Or, in Obama’s view, you could send in more troops now, take a large swing at the Taliban, securing most of the cities while the Afghan army moves up to speed.

It’s all a gamble, a hope that this option is the least-worst of many bad options. And whatever happens in Afghanistan - and it’s hard to imagine enough good things happening there in 18 months - the real fight is in Pakistan, a place where Americans can’t, at least openly, fight at all.

The gamble is that, with a deadline, the Afghan government knows it will have to step up or face the Taliban alone. The gamble is that, with a deadline in Afghanistan, Pakistan will understand the risk of not having Americans on its flank.

It’s all a gamble. But Obama is not unfamiliar with the stakes. He knows his own party wants out of Afghanistan. He knows Republicans will not be convinced that he’s suddenly a hardliner. He knows that Gen. Stanley McChrystal may not be able to pull off a miracle. He knows how hard it would be to leave if the plan fails.

Still, Obama promised to start withdrawing the troops in July 2011. OK, he’s missed deadlines before, but the date itself isn’t so important.

The goal of this war speech was not that this would be the end of the beginning, but, rather, if things work out right, the beginning of the end.

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