Tonight, President Obama told the American people that we would begin to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, largely sticking to the schedule that he spelled out in his December 2009 address at West Point. For those who missed it, the President announced that 10,000 troops would return from Afghanistan by the end of this year and that 23,000 more would return by September 2012, returning troop levels to those before 2009's “surge.” Like all presidential decisions, this one already has vocal critics: members of both parties are simultaneously decrying the strategy as being both too precipitous and too slow a withdrawal. Whatever its faults, though, Obama's decision will have repercussions far beyond the end of his presidency—and it may be the beginning of a new era in U.S. foreign policy.
To understand Obama's choice, we need to examine his priorities in the region. He said in 2009 that he had three goals: to deny al-Qaeda a safe haven in Afghanistan, to reverse the momentum of the Taliban and to strengthen the Afghan government. Let's look to see what has actually been accomplished. On the first goal, the president's Afghanistan strategy has so far been a success; most experts say that there are far fewer than one thousand al Qaeda fighters left in the country, and of course, Obama's biggest victory on the counterterrorism front came with the death of Osama bin Laden. Moving on to the second goal, it has arguably been a success as well. In 2008 the Taliban were attacking the Afghan government and had taken back much of the territory that U.S. troops had won in the early years of the war. Fast forward to 2011 and we see that U.S. and NATO forces have been successful in both of their major offensives (in Marjah and Kandahar) against Taliban strongholds. More importantly, coalition forces are holding these areas successfully.
Now we come to Obama's third goal: strengthening the rule of the Afghan government. This is the most problematic of his priorities, as President Hamid Karzai's government has, at best, tenuous rule over populated areas, and has been subject to constant criticisms of weakness and outright corruption. That being said, Afghan troops are being trained and Karzai's government has not fallen, so the White House may consider this one a draw: it wasn't exactly successful, but it could have been a whole lot worse.
Looking, then, at Obama's priorities for the war in Afghanistan, one can see why he feels comfortable scaling back the number of troops there now. At least two (call it two-and-a-half) of his goals have been met, enough to convince him to stick to his promised timeline.
To borrow one of the president's favorite phrases, let me be clear: I'm not going to try to pass judgement on whether or not President Obama is pursuing the right strategy—we won't know that for several years. I am, though, trying to comment on what this strategy means in the context of American politics and in the context of American foreign policy in the future.
This strategy, more than anything else, was a result of two factors: war fatigue and isolationism. This past year, the war in Afghanistan surpassed both the Vietnam War and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in length; that's a long time for any nation to be at war overseas. Recent polling shows that the American public is quickly losing faith in our ability to “win” in Afghanistan, and just want us to cut our losses and get out now. Obama's own party has long been calling for a withdrawal such as the one that recently took place in Iraq, and it would appear that the voices finally got too loud to argue with.
War fatigue is to be expected when a conflict lasts this long. Isolationism, though, is a troubling trend in politics today, and it is growing. In the Republican presidential debate last week, not a single candidate suggested that we stay in Afghanistan. Remember that Republicans are widely considered the party that is strong on national defense and willing to fight as long as necessary. Instead, both presidential candidates and House Republicans are arguing that, with a weak economy and problems at home, we need to focus our resources here in America. The president said as much when he stated that “it is time to focus on nation building here at home.” Because of this emphasis on prosperity at home over success overseas, some have reported that Obama's top military commanders were overruled when they claimed that a slower drawdown would be much safer.
Clearly, Americans don't learn from the past. Those who have studied history know that the Great Depression resulted in the most isolationist period in modern U.S. history, a period that saw the rise of fascism in Europe and imperialism in Japan, to say nothing of the Soviet Union. Will that happen again? No. But it's worth wondering what effect a new era of American isolationism will have on global affairs and U.S. influence, if indeed that era is upon us. No less a foreign policy maven than Senator John McCain warned as much in his admonishment of Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia when the latter argued on the Senate floor that we need to withdraw even more quickly. President Obama's speech tonight may well be the start of that era: an end to the America that undertakes nation-building in Iraq or humanitarian interventions in the Arab World. The question we must answer quickly is whether or not that is the future that we want for America.
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