I'm still unhappy with the Obama foreign policy in many specific instances, but my opinion isn't merely weighing all the policies. It is in large part a matter that I don't trust our president's judgment. So while President Obama surged forces in Afghanistan, I don't trust--the way I trusted Bush--his commitment to winning the war he escalated.
My worries are neatly set forth in the joy that greeted the news that we are trying to get out of Afghanistan as soon as possible:
Hurray! A Faster, Smarter Afghan Exit
And by the worry that the Obama administration just wants to confront terrorists and not the states--like Iran--who make them dangerous:
The president and the counterterrorist cognoscenti in his administration may think they are doing the country a favor, since focusing on state actors conjures up war. The White House has exchanged the “global war on terror” for a smaller, supposedly safer, more manageable confrontation with “extremists.” But strategically and tactically, little of what the administration is doing makes sense. We are more likely to find ourselves in a state-to-state confrontation precisely because of Obama’s intentions and methods.
We took down two states that supported terrorism--Saddam's Iraq and the Taliban's Afghanistan. But they aren't the only states who do that. Without addressing the states that support terrorism, the progress we made in dismantling and discrediting Islamist terrorism could be undone. The War on Terror isn't just a matter of using more drones strikes in more places.
When the ruins of the World Trade Center were still smoking, I wrote about our coming war:
The war America is embarking on will be fought on several fronts. Part will be quietly carried out and some aspects will be open. All avenues must complement the others. This will be necessary because the enemy is bifurcated. One part, the main enemy, is the amorphous network of terrorists bound together by their hatred for the United States. It is incomprehensible to them that a just God would grant such material, cultural, and military power to a nation the terrorists regard as corrupt and evil. The second part is composed of the states that in one degree or another, from hosting or rhetorical support to active planning and action, support the primary enemy. Each facet of the enemy demands a different approach and the various instruments of our power must be used precisely to achieve our objectives. No mere lashing out blindly will bring us victory.
Syria needs to be stricken from the enemy column as does Iran. And Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, the obnoxious charter member of the Axis of El Vil, flirts with Iran and seemingly wants to be promoted to full Axis of Evil status. Libya, who we sort of flipped (and then knocked over), stands on the edge of post-revolt chaos, Iraq teeters without our attention after our battlefield win set the stage for a strategic win by giving Iraqis the opportunity to build a real democracy in the heart of the Arab Moslem world. Even the good war in Afghanistan could be undone if we flee on a timetable rather than ease out based on conditions. And what do we do about our frenemy Pakistan? Even the hard-won progress we made against the states who sponsor terrorism could be reversed and we could lose ground. More broadly, we need to move the Arab world so that rulers no longer see Islamism as a force they can exploit to rally support for their continued rule.
Dumping Osama bin Laden's corpse in the ocean didn't resolve the problem of the states that support terrorists who wish to kill us in our homes. We can only pretend for a little while that the delivery of justice in Abbottabad matters more than the states who enabled al Qaeda and other jihadis. I fear our administration's goals are just to make sure that we can pretend until mid-November 2012.
