By Contributing Writer Smileys Pundit

Afghanistan is on a course to become the 21^st century’s Vietnam, not because it has to be, but because we again have a Commander-in-Chief who can’t or won’t do what it takes to prevail.

            The parallels between the situations are significant enough to warrant, not only comparison, but despondency. Look first to parallels between Lyndon Johnson and Barack Obama:

1.       Both presidents inherited the war from their predecessors.

 2.      Both presidents’ primary objective when they came to office was to push through a massive agenda of domestic programs. Remember the Great Society, the last great quantum leap in domestic federal activity?

 3.      Both presidents have shown an aversion to dealing with foreign policy matters. Lyndon Johnson, while recognizing the need to deal with Vietnam, was not about to give up his domestic spending programs. He famously (or infamously) pronounced that “We can have both guns and butter.” Barack Obama has had Gen. McChrystal’s request for more troops on his desk for weeks, apparently ignoring it while scheduling his appearance on just about every television forum other than Fox News, and making a futile jaunt to Copenhagen to try to land the 2016 Olympics. Compare the number of Obama’s speeches devoted to domestic issues versus Afghanistan. Can anyone remember one devoted to Afghanistan?

 4.      Both presidents tended to dabble in the war rather than commit to a strategy and let the people who know what they are doing run the war. Johnson, with the complicity of Robert McNamara and the rest of the best and brightest, attempted to fine tune the levels of violence for political and diplomatic purposes. Even when Johnson escalated the conflict, he did so piecemeal, rather than massively and suddenly, which allowed the NVA to match the reinforcements; this only perpetuated the stalemate, but with far higher casualties on both sides. 

 5.      Both presidents had a left wing of their own party which was disaffected with the war.

 There are other similarities between the situations. Both Vietnam and Afghanistan are primarily rural. Both have hostile climates, both had ineffective and/or corrupt central governments, and both were located adjacent to countries used as sanctuaries from which troops could enter the country.

Ultimately, we will not win in Afghanistan for the following reasons.

1.      The president isn’t serious about it. He’s never appreciated the seriousness of the war on terror. He semantically downgraded terrorist attacks to “man-made disasters”, and the war on terror to “overseas contingency operations.” During the campaign, Obama sounded like a hawk on Afghanistan. Back then, it was the “good” war as opposed to the “bad” one in Iraq, which Obama argued had led President Bush to “take his eyes off the ball (Afghanistan).” But the hawkish talk about Afghanistan was only a smokescreen allowing Obama to trash the war in Iraq while still sounding like a vigorous enemy of terrorism. Now that he’s the president and Iraq is almost on auto pilot, things look different. He has, thus far, dithered on Gen. McChrystal’s request for more troops; that he had already received it was only known because of a leak. When asked on a Sunday news show what he would do about the request, he said that he needed to be clear on the strategy before putting more troops at risk. This statement ignored the fact that, last March, Obama announced “a comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.” It’s not clear whether that strategy was wrong or he forgot about it. Either way, the war does not seem to be a pressing issue. While Obama dithered, recently, we lost 8 of our soldiers when their position was overrun, (something that NEVER happens to our troops) due to insufficient numbers of troops and helicopters,  

 2.      He needs to appease the left wing of his own party. The left put up with his hawkish talk during the campaign because they knew he didn’t really mean it. But now he’s in the Oval Office, he’s the C-in-C, and he’s already increased the troop levels instead of starting to get us out. His wonderfulness has bought him more time than LBJ had, but make no mistake about it, the left wing of the Democratic Party is an unforgiving bunch. If their hostility toward the war could be channeled against terrorists, we’d have the war on terror won by now.

 3.      Obama will look for “middle ground.” One of Obama’s predictable postures is to be above the fray. Even if he’s engaged in a dispute, he will posit one side against another and proclaim his solution from Mt. Olympus. Accordingly, he will put Gen. McChrystal’s request on one side, put the left wing of his own party on the other side, and make a pronouncement which will in some way split the difference. He will, for example, announce a different strategy, better than the one currently being followed, which will require fewer troops. He will send more troops, but not as many as were requested, thus displaying his more enlightened judgment on the matter. The only problem is that, unlike Obama, McChrystal knows what he is doing, and the failure to honor the request in full will result in poor results on the ground.

 4.      Public disaffection with the war. After the situation deteriorates over a period of time, with mounting U.S. casualties and no measurable gains, the American public will tire of the war (remember this has been going on since before Iraq); even some conservatives like George Will are ready to bug out. Not wanting to still be fighting the war as re-election time approaches, Obama will announce our withdrawal on some pretext, e.g., we can monitor and control terrorists by using drones. When this strategy leads to disaster, he will argue that President Bush was so preoccupied with Iraq that he allowed Afghanistan to deteriorate to the point where success, as normally defined, was impossible by the time Obama took office. He won’t say “victory” was impossible, because he doesn’t feel comfortable with that word, which he said conjures up images in his mind of Emperor Hirohito (sic) signing the surrender aboard the Missouri.

The military leadership can perform no better than its civilian commander-in-chief allows. Unfortunately, McChrystal seems destined to be the latest in a series of generals throughout our history who were prevented from serving as effectively as they might. Afghanistan will again become a safe haven from which to launch terrorist operations, and persons intent on minimizing the exercise of our power abroad in the future will ceaselessly admonish us to remember the “lessons of Afghanistan.”

      I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think so.