Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
Washington Post
September 21, 2008
Pg. B7
By Jim Hoagland
A war that can be won is a valuable asset for a presidential candidate. It spreads hope and wards off vote-numbing despair on the campaign trail. For Barack Obama, the winnable war is Afghanistan. John McCain makes the same claim for Iraq.
Each candidate arrives at his differing assessment through political calculation as much as battlefield analysis. That is inevitable in modern politics. Each must engage in a certain amount of image projection -- that is, make-believe -- on conflicts they do not yet control as they fight toward Election Day.
The indisputable point is this: The political and military campaigns being waged simultaneously in and by the United States intersect in the ungoverned badlands of the greater Middle East. The candidate who most convincingly argues that he knows how to adapt and focus the uneven military effort to eliminate the threat posed by jihadist terrorists will have an important advantage.
That contest is still to be won as well. McCain has recently made progress in selling his vision as security has improved in Iraq and worsened in Afghanistan. But events in the Afghan theater are moving in Obama's direction -- thanks largely and unwittingly to the Bush administration.
In its final months, the Bush White House -- along with the Pentagon -- is laboring hard to avoid crippling disruptions during the coming transition by locking in policies for the year to come. The idea is to move down in Iraq, up in Afghanistan and sideways on Pakistan.
This triple-play strategy was essentially put in place during a July 23 meeting involving Bush, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the "tank," the chiefs' secure conference facility at the Pentagon. Little has filtered out from this meeting, "which was limited in attendance and tightly held even by the standards of the tank," says one Pentagon official.
But the shape of that day's decisions has since been made apparent by plans to send to Afghanistan about 5,000 U.S. combat troops who would have normally deployed to Iraq over the next five months. An additional 3,000 troops will leave Iraq for home in that same period.
By design or otherwise, these decisions support McCain's assertions that the "surge" -- skillfully managed in Iraq and masterfully presented to the American public by Gen. David Petraeus as a success in its own terms -- has moved Iraq from the "hopeless" to the "hopeful," or winnable, column. Without that change, McCain's suddenly improved chances of victory in November would have continued to languish.
McCain and Petraeus understand that the American people will tolerate difficult conflicts abroad -- as long as they are convinced that their leaders know what they are doing. It was not only rising casualties that decisively broke domestic support for the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. It was also the spreading and largely justified feeling that the U.S. commanders of that conflict were incompetent.
A new Bush strategy for Pakistan has also emerged since the July 23 meeting and the Aug. 18 resignation of President Pervez Musharraf, whom Bush protected as America's best bet even as Musharraf failed to gain control over border areas used as sanctuary by al-Qaeda and the Taliban to destabilize Afghanistan.
It is not clear whether this change is "better late than never" or "too little too late." But it does validate Obama's bold assertion earlier in the campaign that he would act unilaterally inside Pakistan's border areas if it improved U.S. security. This is what Bush is now doing.
The replacement of Musharraf by an unsteady civilian government, which has scant control over Pakistan's army and unreliable intelligence services, has led to an increase both in U.S. raids on the tribal areas and, more important, in publicity about U.S. willingness to conduct such raids, which have occurred episodically if secretly since 2002.
The idea is to pressure the civilian authorities -- through public visits by U.S. commanders, well-publicized Predator missions and U.S. boots on the ground -- to crack down on the sanctuaries themselves or risk even greater turmoil there. Such pressure on Musharraf earlier might have made him deliver much more.
The attack on the U.S. Embassy in Yemen last week is a sign that al-Qaeda & Co. will try to vote in this election as well. The jihadists remind Americans that Bush's successor, whoever he is, will inherit a war to fight, and to win, in reality as well as in speeches.
September 21, 2008
Pg. B7
By Jim Hoagland
A war that can be won is a valuable asset for a presidential candidate. It spreads hope and wards off vote-numbing despair on the campaign trail. For Barack Obama, the winnable war is Afghanistan. John McCain makes the same claim for Iraq.
Each candidate arrives at his differing assessment through political calculation as much as battlefield analysis. That is inevitable in modern politics. Each must engage in a certain amount of image projection -- that is, make-believe -- on conflicts they do not yet control as they fight toward Election Day.
The indisputable point is this: The political and military campaigns being waged simultaneously in and by the United States intersect in the ungoverned badlands of the greater Middle East. The candidate who most convincingly argues that he knows how to adapt and focus the uneven military effort to eliminate the threat posed by jihadist terrorists will have an important advantage.
That contest is still to be won as well. McCain has recently made progress in selling his vision as security has improved in Iraq and worsened in Afghanistan. But events in the Afghan theater are moving in Obama's direction -- thanks largely and unwittingly to the Bush administration.
In its final months, the Bush White House -- along with the Pentagon -- is laboring hard to avoid crippling disruptions during the coming transition by locking in policies for the year to come. The idea is to move down in Iraq, up in Afghanistan and sideways on Pakistan.
This triple-play strategy was essentially put in place during a July 23 meeting involving Bush, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the "tank," the chiefs' secure conference facility at the Pentagon. Little has filtered out from this meeting, "which was limited in attendance and tightly held even by the standards of the tank," says one Pentagon official.
But the shape of that day's decisions has since been made apparent by plans to send to Afghanistan about 5,000 U.S. combat troops who would have normally deployed to Iraq over the next five months. An additional 3,000 troops will leave Iraq for home in that same period.
By design or otherwise, these decisions support McCain's assertions that the "surge" -- skillfully managed in Iraq and masterfully presented to the American public by Gen. David Petraeus as a success in its own terms -- has moved Iraq from the "hopeless" to the "hopeful," or winnable, column. Without that change, McCain's suddenly improved chances of victory in November would have continued to languish.
McCain and Petraeus understand that the American people will tolerate difficult conflicts abroad -- as long as they are convinced that their leaders know what they are doing. It was not only rising casualties that decisively broke domestic support for the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. It was also the spreading and largely justified feeling that the U.S. commanders of that conflict were incompetent.
A new Bush strategy for Pakistan has also emerged since the July 23 meeting and the Aug. 18 resignation of President Pervez Musharraf, whom Bush protected as America's best bet even as Musharraf failed to gain control over border areas used as sanctuary by al-Qaeda and the Taliban to destabilize Afghanistan.
It is not clear whether this change is "better late than never" or "too little too late." But it does validate Obama's bold assertion earlier in the campaign that he would act unilaterally inside Pakistan's border areas if it improved U.S. security. This is what Bush is now doing.
The replacement of Musharraf by an unsteady civilian government, which has scant control over Pakistan's army and unreliable intelligence services, has led to an increase both in U.S. raids on the tribal areas and, more important, in publicity about U.S. willingness to conduct such raids, which have occurred episodically if secretly since 2002.
The idea is to pressure the civilian authorities -- through public visits by U.S. commanders, well-publicized Predator missions and U.S. boots on the ground -- to crack down on the sanctuaries themselves or risk even greater turmoil there. Such pressure on Musharraf earlier might have made him deliver much more.
The attack on the U.S. Embassy in Yemen last week is a sign that al-Qaeda & Co. will try to vote in this election as well. The jihadists remind Americans that Bush's successor, whoever he is, will inherit a war to fight, and to win, in reality as well as in speeches.