Obama’s Legacy and the “Endless” War

Pres­id­ent Obama’s de­cision to halt the planned with­draw­al of Amer­ic­an troops from Afgh­anistan is a re­mind­er that wars rarely are as neat as cam­paign prom­ises, par­tic­u­larly when the bat­tle­field is the hos­tile ter­rain of Afgh­anistan, a land where for­eign in­vaders have found it chal­len­ging to main­tain mil­it­ary oc­cu­pa­tions.

Get­ting out al­ways has been messy there, as the 19th-cen­tury Brit­ish and 20th-cen­tury So­vi­ets dis­covered. There are clear dif­fer­ences, though, for 21st-cen­tury Amer­ica, dif­fer­ences noted by the pres­id­ent in his somber re­marks in the Roosevelt Room on Thursday. As he stated, the bulk of the U.S. troops have long since gone home, Amer­ic­an cas­u­al­ties have dwindled, com­bat op­er­a­tions have be­come the re­spons­ib­il­ity of Afghan forces, and a demo­crat­ic­ally elec­ted Afghan gov­ern­ment has asked for the delay in the fi­nal draw-down.

None of that has shiel­ded the pres­id­ent from cri­ti­cism from both his right and his left. House Speak­er John Boehner ac­cused the pres­id­ent of let­ting “cam­paign prom­ises and par­tis­an agen­das” set his war policy, re­flect­ing the Re­pub­lic­an be­lief that too many troops have been pulled out too fast, al­low­ing ter­ror­ist gains. On the left, the feel­ing is the pul­lout has been too little. “Obama Adds End­less Afghan War to Leg­acy” was the head­line Thursday in Com­mon Dreams, a pro­gress­ive pub­lic­a­tion.

At the White House, they know that the neat leg­acy Obama’s team had yearned for now is un­at­tain­able. They know that the first sen­tence in the his­tory books will be that he was the first Afric­an-Amer­ic­an pres­id­ent. But they hoped the second sen­tence would be that he ended the two shoot­ing wars that he in­her­ited from Pres­id­ent George W. Bush. Thursday’s an­nounce­ment changes that sen­tence.

If that is dis­ap­point­ing to Obama, he didn’t show it Thursday, flatly deny­ing that it is a set­back and cast­ing it as a not-sur­pris­ing re­as­sess­ment of the situ­ation on the ground in Afgh­anistan. “This de­cision is not dis­ap­point­ing,” he in­sisted, adding, “This isn’t the first time those ad­just­ments have been made; this prob­ably won’t be the last.”

What’s im­port­ant, he said, is that the United States proves to the Afghans that “we’re go­ing to be a steady part­ner for them.” Left un­said was an ac­know­ledge­ment that the Pentagon nev­er thought it wise to re­duce the Amer­ic­an com­mit­ment so deeply that only enough troops to pro­tect the em­bassy re­mained. Afgh­anistan is just too crit­ic­al to the fight against ter­ror­ism and too much Amer­ic­an blood has been shed to risk a takeover of Afghan cit­ies by either the Taliban or the more ex­trem­ist Is­lam­ic State.

This is a re­versal of a spe­cif­ic timetable once out­lined by the pres­id­ent. But it is not a be­tray­al of cam­paign prom­ises. In fact, Obama has con­sist­ently cham­pioned the U.S. mis­sion in Afgh­anistan even as he was at­tack­ing Bush’s 2003 in­va­sion of Ir­aq and the res­ult­ing war there. In the 2002 speech in which he an­nounced his op­pos­i­tion to war in Ir­aq, he im­pli­citly sup­por­ted go­ing in­to Afgh­anistan to hunt down Osama bin Laden. “I was a strong sup­port­er of the war in Afgh­anistan,” he re­called later about that speech.

Then, in his 2008 cam­paign, he prom­ised, “When I am pres­id­ent, we will wage the war that has to be won. … There must be no safe haven for ter­ror­ists who threaten Amer­ica.” He pledged to send more com­bat bri­gades to Afgh­anistan. He kept that prom­ise less than a month after his in­aug­ur­a­tion. In of­fice, one of his most im­port­ant na­tion­al se­cur­ity de­cisions in 2009 was to send an ad­di­tion­al 30,000 troops there. Re­peatedly, he cast Ir­aq as a dis­trac­tion from Afgh­anistan, stat­ing it “de­prived (U.S. troops) of the sup­port they need and de­serve.”

Now, his latest de­cision is very much in keep­ing with his 2008 cam­paign prom­ise to “fin­ish the job against al-Qaida in Afgh­anistan.”

This just isn’t the way that the pres­id­ent thought he would get there. Or the timetable he thought he would fol­low. Run­ning for reelec­tion in 2012, he hoped to “end the war in Afgh­anistan in 2014.” Now, he words it more care­fully, stat­ing that “Amer­ica’s com­bat mis­sion” there did, in­deed, con­clude in 2014. But he has come to re­cog­nize that he can­not re­spons­ibly end U.S. in­volve­ment in the war as he had hoped.

It’s not a con­clu­sion he wanted to reach. Nor is it one that gives him the de­sired, neat leg­acy. But it is one he reached after meet­ing with top mil­it­ary com­mand­ers to “con­tinu­ally as­sess, hon­estly, the situ­ation on the ground to de­term­ine where our strategy is work­ing and where we may need great­er flex­ib­il­ity.” In the end, that is what a com­mand­er in chief is sup­posed to do—even if it messes with his polit­ic­al leg­acy.