Obama Just Half-Right on Afghanistan

President Barack Obama’s decision to add up to 30,000 additional troops to the efforts in Afghanistan to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaida once and for all was the correct one. But the president only gets half-a-star for his efforts.

America’s military leaders on the ground in Afghanistan had requested the troop buildup months ago, as it became evident the Taliban was resurgent in the country’s hinterland. And with the resurgence of the fundamentalist Taliban has come Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida, creeping back into the nation from which it planned and launched the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Before the smoke of Sept. 11 had cleared, U.S. intelligence had developed an airtight case against al-Qaida and the Taliban, then in control of Afghanistan, as the perpetrators of the attacks, which killed more than 3,000 people.

In barely a month, President George W. Bush launched a devestating attack on Afghanistan that topped the fundamentalist Islamic regime in only a few weeks.

Afghanistan was the military’s focus for the first half of 2002, but gradually slipped off the radar screen as the Bush administration ratcheted up planning and preparation for war in Iraq and the hunt for its supposed weapons of mass destruction.

Washington’s interest in Afghanistan waned as events on the surface created the perception that all was well on track to success in the mountain enclave.

It couldn’t have been further from the truth.

The administration of President Hamid Karzai developed the disease of so many regimes in that part of the world: top-to-bottom corruption. War lords, the real power brokers in the country, were back to their old tricks of carving up personal feifdoms, far removed from the control of the central government in Kabul. And the Taliban, who had staged a strategic retreat more than they had been defeated, slowly clawed back to positions of power and influence throughout the rural country.

This is just the sort of unsettled political vacuum that terrorists such as bin Laden and his al-Qaida crave. As terror attacks increased against U.S. and NATO troops, commanders in the field formulated a new battle plan designed to stamp down the Taliban. Key to the plan was the introduction of an additional 30,000 troops.

They took their plan and their request to the White House months ago, and there it sat. While policymakers and political advisers to the president debated it and weighed the pros and cons of an Afghan surge, the situation in Afghanistan deteriorated further, culminating in a presidential election tainted by claims of fraud and al-Qaida infiltration into parts of neighboring Pakistan.

When the president finally ... finally ... made a decision, he did so in such equivocal, wavering terms so as to render himself, and America, impotent. Throw into the mix the fact that he imposed an 18-month deadline for the surge to be successful, and you’ve got the makings of a foreign policy disaster.

We hope our pessimism is misplaced, that the Obama surge works as well as the Bush surge did in Iraq. But to be honest, we’re not holding our breath.