Afghanistan: Where Progressives Turn Into Hawks?

By Steve Hynd

For eight years, we got used to the notion of IOKIYAR (It's OK if you are Republican), the hypocritical way that the right would do what it had previously castigated the left for doing, and just shrug it off with a Cheney-like "So?"

Now, as President Obama doubles down on Afghanistan and Pakistan militarily - without an exit strategy, without a benchmark in sight and without telling the country how long it will take or how much it will cost - suddenly...IOKIYAD.

If Bush had publicly advanced such a plan, progressives would have been unified in opposition, and rightly so. The notion that a smart president could be flexible, "adjust" the strategy as he goes along or even reverse course if need be without having to go into pesky detail for "the people" would have been seen as utter arrogance, as another promulgation of the concept of the Imperial Presidency. Progressives would have pointed out that the always-wrong neocons, neoliberal "blue dog" interventionists and the military-industrial complex would be Wormtongue whispering from word one, telling the president he couldn't back off if things went wrong, he'd look "weak". They'd have pointed to Vietnam, when exactly that happened. They'd have pointed to Iraq, where only massive sectarian segregation and papering over the cracks in deep divisions with bribery allowed a similiar strategy to look like it was working for a while. They'd have pointed out that there was no popular backing, in either the U.S. or Afghanistan, for a 15 year occupation. Or that such an occupation would cost upwards of $1.3 trillion of deficit spending at a time of economic crisis. They'd have pointed out that the intelligence community advised the president that airstrikes into Pakistan would be dangerously destabilizing to that fragile nation and that the Pakistani military were Indian givers. That the president was gambling vast amounts of blood and treasure on counter-insurgency tactics which had no guarantee of working, but would guarantee America would be seen as an interventionist foreign occupier for many years to come. That the logic of the plan demanded that Somalia, Yemen or other "safe havens" be the next targets for U.S. nation building at gunpoint.

And in fact, the current Obama strategy is almost exactly the same as the one the Bush administration had in its last months, although Bush never rolled out a white paper - and progressives said all those things.

But as soon as Obama moved into the White House, partisan cheerleading took over. Very Serious People from a think-tank closely connected to military COIN advocates and to Generals Petraeus, Odierno et al - the interventionist, neoliberal mothership at CNAS - swiftly became the new DoD and few batted an eye. The new administration proposed a defense budget that was not only higher than the Pentagon had asked for - after the military budget had already doubled since 2001 - but explicitly looked to reconfigure the U.S. military as a force capable of fighting new interventionist COIN wars elsewhere. Progressives mainly talked as if it was a budget cut. Obama published his Af/Pak "stratergy" and progressives started whistling past the graveyard - some even actively moved themselves to sit on the neocon side of the fence.

Apparently it's OK to wage decades-long, multi-billion, colonialist wars without exit plans if you're a Democrat. IOKIYAD.

One progressive blogger in a listserv discussion told me : "We will be in Afghan, Columbia, Iraq, and all over Africa, for decades to come, fighting third world peoples...that is how we will win the coming regional resource wars over the next 50 years." Another wrote:

One of the things that really came home to me after Obama's election is how much the world really, deeply *wants* America to uphold its own ideas. It needs us to be who we are. But part of that is that it depends on us to be the final arbiter of things, and wants us to be a  just and fair one. We tend to see our military in terms of what it can do to defend our interests; but despite the wretched history, there's much of the world that still counts on it to defend theirs as well. That's what it means to be an empire.

Roll out the Exceptionalist interventionism and the White Man's Burden, the last 8 years didn't happen, there's a Dem in the White House! IOKIYAD. In the end,it's counter-productive.

In their eagerness to help the Obama presidency, many of its prominent liberal supporters -- whatever their private views on the escalation -- are willing to function as enablers of the expanded warfare. Many assume that opposition would undermine the administration and play into the hands of Republicans. But in the long run, going along with the escalation is not helping Obama; by putting off the days of reckoning, the acceptance of the escalation may actually help Obama destroy his own presidency.

But there's pushback.

More and more people with deep knowledge and experience, from former Ambassador Dan Simpson to the Carnegie Endowment’s Gilles Dorronsoro to Andrew Bacevich to NSN’s Les Gelb are saying that we can achieve President Obama’s main goal - defeating Al Qaeda - without a costly and counterproductive escalation in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Politicians are debating the war too. A fierce debate took place within the administration regarding strategy in Afghanistan, with Vice President Biden and others arguing for a more limited set of objectives than what we see in the finished product. The 77-strong Congressional Progressive Caucus is holding a series of forums on Afghanistan with the aim of making formal recommendations to the administration. Some members of Congress have gone further, sending a letter asking the President to reconsider escalation.

It is important that Americans - especially progressives - recognize that despite the seeming unanimity among experts from the right and left, there is vigorous debate and dissent around Afghanistan policy.

Today, GetAfghanistanRight.com are holding a day of blogging from those who don't accept these partisan fabrications to protect a rotten plan. OxDown Gazette is aggregating many of those posts. Jason Rosenbaum explains:

42 years ago today, on April 4th, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King first spoke out against the Vietnam war in a speech entitled “A Time to Break Silence.”

On April 6th, 2009, Get Afghanistan Right, in coordination with bloggers, writers, and activists all over the country, will participate in demonstrations both online and offline around the war in Afghanistan, with the aim of getting our fellow Americans to break their silence and voice their views on the conflict, which is escalating now that President Obama has completed his strategy review.

I oppose this escalation, because I do not think it will work, because it costs to much, and because it is not necessary to keep America safe. I will be writing about this on April 6th. I hope you will join me.

Write a blog post on April 6th. Write it on your own site and then email Get Afghanistan Right, so we can aggregate your post with others on our homepage. Or, write a post on Oxdown Gazette over at Firedoglake, a site where anyone can write a post. (Click here for instructions.) Whatever you choose to do, just break the silence. The world will be better for it.