On Thursday, President Obama announced his plan to leave nearly 5,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan until early 2017. The plan will maintain the current levels of armed forces until shortly after the end of Obama’s presidency. The can will be kicked down the road, so that the next presidential administration can deal with the fall-out of a failed Obama foreign policy doctrine.
The White House’s decision reneged on a highly-publicized pledge to fully withdraw from the country. For years now, President Obama has vowed to “end the war in Afghanistan,” attempting to cement his legacy as a pacifist president. This is not the first time Obama has shifted his policy. In fact, a series of announced delays and promises of false hope for U.S. soldiers stationed in Afghanistan have massively undermined the Obama administration’s credibility.
In an effort to pander to a perceived public appetite for isolationism, Obama has decided key foreign policy strategies from the bully pulpit instead of the Situation Room, posturing as a meditative monk instead of a robust Commander-in-Chief.
Politicizing a war-time calculus is tantamount to submitting to the tyranny of the majority. To quell the capricious mobs, Roman emperors gave the agitators gladiatorial games. This president gives the roaring masses Dionysian feasts of docility. Unfortunately, that’s not how wars work.
Foreign crises are fluid and ever-changing. The Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces must respond to shifting geopolitical realities. The art of statecraft precludes the embrace of myopia, but President Obama didn’t get the memo. The rigid ideologue failed to account for the fallout from the Arab Spring, rebel-led coups of sovereign governments, theocratic insurrections, and gaping power vacuums in the Middle East.
Like a child just coming to realize that the tooth fairy doesn’t exist, Obama confessed that Afghan security forces “are not as strong as they need to be.” Mr. President, your own generals have been telling you that for years. Top military officials have been quietly and sometimes publicly expressing their utter disbelief at this president’s naiveté.
“None of the White House staff has any experience in war or understands it.”
Gen. Robert H. Scales
“No solider in this right mind would guarantee ‘no boots on the ground.’ You can never make such guarantees,” a retired senior military commander told Politico’s Rosa Brooks. Brooks noted Obama’s dangerous lack of foresight all the way back in November of 2013, lamenting the president’s bizarre rhetorical acrobatics:
Obama…presided over a seven-month air campaign in Libya and has accelerated a covert drone war that has so far killed an estimated 4,000 people in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. Through all this, the president has continued to express his dismay over the nation’s militarized foreign policy: “We cannot use force everywhere,” he insisted in May. “Perpetual war … will prove self-defeating, and alter our country in troubling ways.”
In a scathing editorial penned for The Washington Post, Gen. Robert H. Scales, a retired Army major general and former commandant of the U.S. Army War College, surgically examined the dysfunctional organs of an Obama administration contaminated by foreign policy ineptitude. Military officials inside the Pentagon are “embarrassed to be associated with the amateurism of the Obama administration’s attempts to craft a plan that makes strategic sense,” asserted Scales, “None of the White House staff has any experience in war or understands it.” The general continued his critique admonishing the administration’s grave strategic errors. “So far, at least, this path to war violates every principle of war, including the element of surprise, achieving mass and having a clearly defined and obtainable objective,” instructed Scales.
After abruptly withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq, the region devolved into unprecedented civil war between former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Shiite factions in Baghdad and aggrieved Sunni tribal sectors in the East. Failing to properly train Iraqi security forces, the Obama administration left the keys in the ignition of an inchoate Iraqi political infrastructure.
The country consequently rolled down the hill of sectarian strife, self-imploding into a terrorist haven for ISIS fighters. The truth is, the same Iraq that was secured and stabilized by President Bush’s prescient surge is no longer recognizable as a consolidated nation-state. Iraq is fragmented into shards of dissent, as the semi-autonomous Kurds appear to be the only viable political entity in the country. Obama’s pontifications about a glorious “pull-out” failed to mention that he continued arming the corrupt Maliki regime with minimal supervision.
As nepotism reigned supreme, Maliki displaced Saddam Hussein’s former Baathist generals with unskilled family members and extreme Shiite loyalists. As a result, the military hierarchy collapsed, leaving an incompetent patchwork of poorly trained security forces and poorly paid deserters. Without a hint of U.S. ground support, these security forces are now dispatched to fight off ISIS, a highly-organized and massively funded colonial scourge. Emerging from a post-‘pull-out’ power vacuum, ISIS recruited Saddam’s defected Baathist generals, providing the militia with incomparable knowledge of terrain and tactical expertise. The spill-over from the civil war in Syria also granted an opening for ISIS. As U.S. allied moderates Free Syrian Army rebels were abandoned by the Obama administration, ISIS shattered their ranks and monopolized the fight against Bashar al-Assad.
Iraq is now a wasteland of corpses and jihadist colonialism. Theocratic impulses have supplanted democratic governance as the Iraqi army scavenges for some semblance of support. The Obama administration has unequivocally failed Iraq and its people. It’s no longer “Bush’s War.” After almost two presidential terms, Iraq has become Obama’s forgotten wasteland.
Now that Afghanistan is on the verge of collapse, Obama has backpedaled his populist pandering even if it means assuming the disagreeable title of oath breaker. For the first time in nearly a decade, the ghosts of the Taliban have re-emerged with vengeance, seeking to wreak havoc on Afghanistan’s young democracy. Let’s just hope that Afghanistan doesn’t turn into another one of Obama’s abandoned abysses in Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and South Sudan.