The American Way Of War Part 9

The Afghan Speech Obama Should (But Won't) Give.

[Note: This was written in November 2009, more than a month before President Obama addressed the nation from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point on the Afghan War.]

It's common knowledge that a president-but above all a Democratic president-who tried to de-escalate a war like the one now expanding in Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan, and withdraw American troops, would be so much domestic political dead meat. This everyday bit of engrained Washington wisdom is, in fact, based on not a shred of evidence in the historical record. We do know something about what could happen to a president who escalates a counterinsurgency war: Lyndon Johnson comes to mind for expanding his inherited war in Vietnam out of fear that he would be labeled the president who "lost" that country to the Communists. And then there was Vice President Hubert Humphrey, incapable of rejecting Johnson's war policy, who lost the 1968 election to Richard Nixon, a candidate pushing a fraudulent "peace with honor" formula for downsizing the war.

Still, we have no evidence about how American voters would deal with a president who didn't take the Johnson approach to a losing war. We do know that there would be those on the right, and quite a few warfightin' liberals as well, who would go nuclear over any presidentially approved withdrawal from Afghanistan. And we know that a media storm would certainly follow. But when it comes to how voters would react, especially at a moment when unhappiness with the Afghan War (as well as the president's handling of it) is on the rise, there is no evidence.

While we don't know what exactly is going through Obama's mind, or just when or in what form he will address us, we do know something about what his conclusions are likely to be; we do know that he's not going to recommend a "minus option." We have long been a.s.sured that any proposals for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan were never "on the table."

In any case, we-the rest of us-have had all the disadvantages of essentially being in on the president's councils these last months, and none of the advantages of offering our own advice. Personally, I prefer not to leave the process to speechwriters and advisers.

What follows, then, is my version of the president's Afghan announcement. I've imagined it as a challenging prime-time address to the American people, doing what no American president has yet done.

The White House.

Office of the Press Secretary.

A New Way Forward:

The President's Address to the American People.

on Afghan Strategy

Oval Office

For Immediate Release-December 2, 2009.

8:01 P.M. EDT.

My fellow Americans, On March 28, I outlined what I called a "comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan." It was ambitious. It was also an attempt to fulfill a campaign promise that was heartfelt. I believed-and still believe-that, in invading Iraq, a war this administration is now ending, we took our eye off Afghanistan. Our well-being and safety, as well as that of the Afghan people, suffered for it.

I suggested then that the situation in Afghanistan was already "perilous." I announced that we would be sending seventeen thousand more American soldiers into that war zone, as well as four thousand trainers and advisers whose job would be to increase the size of the Afghan security forces so that they could someday take the lead in securing their own country. There could be no more serious decision for an American president.

Eight months have pa.s.sed since that day. This evening, after a comprehensive policy review of our options in that region that has involved commanders in the field, the joint chiefs of staff, National Security Adviser James Jones, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Vice President Joe Biden, top intelligence and State Department officials and key amba.s.sadors, Special Representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, and experts from inside and outside this administration, I have a very different kind of announcement to make.

I plan to speak to you tonight with the frankness Americans deserve from their president. I have recently noted a number of pundits who suggest that my task here should be to rea.s.sure you about Afghanistan. I don't agree. What you need is the unvarnished truth just as it's been given to me. We all need to face a tough situation, as Americans have done so many times in the past, with our eyes wide open. It doesn't pay for a president or a people to fake it or, for that matter, to kick the can of a difficult decision down the road, especially when the lives of American troops are at stake.

During the presidential campaign I called Afghanistan "the right war." Let me say this: with the full information resources of the American presidency at my fingertips, I no longer believe that to be the case. I know a president isn't supposed to say such things, but he, too, should have the flexibility to change his mind. In fact, more than most people, it's important that he do so based on the best information available. No false pride or political calculation should keep him from that.

And the best information available to me on the situation in Afghanistan is sobering. It doesn't matter whether you are listening to our war commander, General Stanley McChrystal, who, as press reports have indicated, believes that with approximately eighty thousand more troops-which we essentially don't have available-there would be a reasonable chance of conducting a successful counterinsurgency war against the Taliban, or our amba.s.sador to that country, Karl Eikenberry, a former general with significant experience there, who believes we shouldn't send another soldier at present. All agree on the following seven points:1. We have no partner in Afghanistan. The control of the government of Afghan president Hamid Karzai hardly extends beyond the embattled capital of Kabul. He himself has just been returned to office in a presidential election in which voting fraud on an almost unimaginably large scale was the order of the day. His administration is believed to have lost all credibility with the Afghan people.

2. Afghanistan floats in a culture of corruption. This includes President Karzai's administration up to its highest levels and also the warlords who control various areas and, like the Taliban insurgency, are to some degree dependent for their financing on opium, which the country produces in staggering quant.i.ties. Afghanistan, in fact, is not only a narco-state, but the leading narco-state on the planet.

3. Despite billions of dollars of American money poured into training the Afghan security forces, the army is notoriously understrength and largely ineffective; the police forces are riddled with corruption and held in contempt by most of the populace.

4. The Taliban insurgency is spreading and gaining support largely because the Karzai regime has been so thoroughly discredited, the Afghan police and courts are so ineffective and corrupt, and reconstruction funds so badly misspent. Under these circ.u.mstances, American and NATO forces increasingly look like an army of occupation, and more of them are only likely to solidify this impression.

5. Al-Qaeda is no longer a significant factor in Afghanistan. The best intelligence available to me indicates-and again, whatever their disagreements, all my advisers agree on this-that there may be perhaps one hundred al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan and another three hundred in neighboring Pakistan. As I said in March, our goal has been to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and on this we have, especially recently, been successful. Osama bin Laden, of course, remains at large, and his terrorist organization is still a danger to us, but not a $100 billion-plus danger.

6. Our war in Afghanistan has become the military equivalent of a ma.s.sive bailout of a firm determined to fail. Simply to send another 40,000 troops to Afghanistan would, my advisers estimate, cost $40-$54 billion extra; 80,000 troops, more than $80 billion. Sending more trainers and advisers in an effort to double the size of the Afghan security forces, as many have suggested, would cost another estimated $10 billion a year. These figures are over and above the present projected annual costs of the war-$65 billion-and would ensure that the American people will be spending $100 billion a year or more on this war, probably for years to come. Simply put, this is not money we can afford to squander on a failing war thousands of miles from home.

7. Our all-volunteer military has for years now shouldered the burden of our two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even if we were capable of sending 40,000-80,000 more troops to Afghanistan, they would without question be servicepeople on their second, third, fourth, or even fifth tours of duty. A military, even the best in the world, wears down under this sort of stress and pressure.

These seven points have been weighing on my mind over the last weeks as we've deliberated on the right course to take. Tonight, in response to the realities of Afghanistan as I've just described them to you, I've put aside all the subjects that ordinarily obsess Washington, especially whether an American president can reverse the direction of a war and still have an electoral future. That's for the American people, and them alone, to decide.

Given that, let me say as bluntly as I can that I have decided to send no more troops to Afghanistan. Beyond that, I believe it is in the national interest of the American people that this war, like the Iraq War, be drawn down. Over time, our troops and resources will be brought home in an orderly fashion, while we ensure that we provide adequate security for the men and women of our armed forces. Ours will be an administration that will stand or fall, as of today, on this essential position: that we ended, rather than extended, two wars.

This will, of course, take time. But I have already instructed Amba.s.sador Eikenberry and Special Representative Holbrooke to begin discussions, however indirectly, with the Taliban insurgents for a truce in place. Before year's end, I plan to call an international conference of interested countries, including key regional partners, to help work out a way to settle this conflict. I will, in addition, soon announce a schedule for the withdrawal of the first American troops from Afghanistan.

For the counterinsurgency war that we now will not fight, there is already a path laid out. We walked down that well-mined path once in recent American memory and we know where it leads. For ending the war in another way, there is no precedent in our recent history and so no path-only the unknown. But there is hope. Let me try to explain.

Recently, comparisons between the Vietnam War and our current conflict in Afghanistan have been legion. Let me, however, suggest a major difference between the two. When Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson faced their crises involving sending more troops into Vietnam, they and their advisers had little to rely on in the American record. They, in a sense, faced the darkness of the unknown as they made their choices. The same is not true of us.

In the White House, for instance, a number of us have been reading a book on how the United States got itself ever more disastrously involved in the Vietnam War. We have history to guide us here. We know what happens in counterinsurgency campaigns. We have the experience of Vietnam as a landmark on the trail behind us. And if that weren't enough, of course, we have the path to defeat already well cleared by the Russians in their Afghan fiasco of the 1980s, when they had just as many troops in the field as we would have if I had chosen to send those extra forty thousand Americans. That is the known.

On the other hand, peering down the path of de-escalation, all we can see is darkness. Nothing like this has been tried before in Washington. But I firmly believe that this, too, is deeply in the American grain. American immigrants, as well as slaves, traveled to this country as if into the darkness of the unknown. Americans have long braved the unknown in all sorts of ways.

To present this more formulaically, if we sent the troops and trainers to Afghanistan, if we increased air strikes and tried to strengthen the Afghan Army, we basically know how things are likely to work out: not well. The war is likely to spread. The insurgents, despite many losses, are likely to grow in strength. Hatred of Americans is likely to increase. Pakistan is likely to become more destabilized.

If, however, we don't take such steps and proceed down that other path, we do not know how things will work out in Afghanistan, or how well.

We do not know how things will work out in Pakistan, or how well.

That is hardly surprising, since we do not know what it means to end such a war now.

But we must not be scared. America will not-of this, as your president, I am convinced-be a safer nation if it spends many hundreds of billions of dollars over many years, essentially bankrupting itself and exhausting its military on what looks increasingly like an unwinnable war. This is not the way to safety, but to national penury-and I am unwilling to preside over an America heading in that direction.

Let me say again that the unknown path, the path into the wilderness, couldn't be more American. We have always been willing to strike out for ourselves where others would not go. That, too, is in the best American tradition.

It is, of course, a perilous thing to predict the future, but in the Afghanistan/Pakistan region, war has visibly only spread war. The beginning of a negotiated peace may have a similarly powerful effect, but in the opposite direction. It may actually take the wind out of the sails of the insurgents on both sides of the Afghan/Pakistan border. It may actually encourage forces in both countries with which we might be more comfortable to step to the fore.

Certainly, we will do our best to lead the way with any aid or advice we can offer toward a future peaceful Afghanistan and a future peaceful Pakistan. In the meantime, I plan to ask Congress to take some of the savings from our two wars winding down and put them into a genuine jobs program for the American people.

The way to safety in our world is, I believe, to secure our borders against those who would harm us, and to put Americans back to work. With this in mind, next month I've called for a White House Jobs Summit, which I plan to chair. And there I will suggest that, as a start, and only as a start, we look at two programs that were not only popular across the political spectrum in the desperate years of the Great Depression, but were remembered fondly long after by those who took part in them-the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration. These basic programs put millions of Americans back to work on public projects that mattered to this nation and saved families, lives, and souls.

We cannot afford a failing war in Afghanistan and a 10.2 percent official unemployment rate at home. We cannot live with two Americas, one for Wall Street and one for everyone else. This is not the path to American safety.

As president, I retain the right to strike at Al-Qaeda or other terrorists who mean us imminent harm, no matter where they may be, including Afghanistan. I would never deny that there are dangers in the approach I suggest today, but when have Americans ever been averse to danger, or to a challenge either? I cannot believe we will be now.

It's time for change. I know that not all Americans will agree with me and that some will be upset by the approach I am now determined to follow. I expect anger and debate. I take full responsibility for whatever may result from this policy departure. Believe me, the buck stops here, but I am convinced that this is the way forward for our country in war and peace, at home and abroad.

I thank you for your time and attention. Goodnight and G.o.d bless America. END 8:35 P.M. EDT

A Symbolic Surrender of Civilian Authority.

On December 1, 2009, from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, in his first prime-time presidential address to the nation, speaking of his plans for Afghanistan, Barack Obama surrendered. There were no surrender doc.u.ments. He wasn't on the deck of the USS Missouri. He never bowed his head. Still, from that moment on, think of him not as the commander in chief, but as the commanded in chief.

Give credit to the victors. Their campaign was nothing short of brilliant. Like the policy brigands they were, they ambushed the president, held him up with their threats, brought to bear key media players and Republican honchos, and in the end made off with the loot. The campaign began with a strategic leak of Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal's grim review of the situation in that country, including demands for sizeable troop escalations and a commitment to a counterinsurgency war. It came to include rumors of potential retirements in protest if the president didn't deliver, as well as clearly insubordinate policy remarks by General McChrystal, not to speak of an impressive citizen-mobilization of inside-the-Beltway former neocon or fighting liberal think-tank experts, and a helping hand from an admiring media. In the process, the U.S. military succeeded in boxing in a president who had already locked himself into a conflict he had termed both "the right war" and a "necessary" one. After more than two months of painfully overreported deliberations, President Obama ended up essentially where General McChrystal began.

Counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine was dusted off from the moldy Vietnam archives and made spanking new by General David Petraeus in 2006, applied in Iraq (and Washington) in 2007, and first put forward for Afghanistan in late 2008. It has now been largely endorsed, and a major escalation of the war-a new kind of military-led nation-building is to be cranked up and set in motion. COIN is being billed as a "population-centric," not "enemy-centric," approach in which U.S. troops are distinctly to be "nation-builders as well as warriors."

The additional thirty thousand troops Obama promised in his speech to surge into Afghanistan are more than the United States had there as late as summer 2008. In less than two years, in fact, U.S. troop strength in that country will have more than tripled to approximately one hundred thousand troops. We're talking about near-Vietnam-level escalation rates. If you include the thirty-eight thousand NATO forces also there (and a possible five thousand more to come), total allied troop strength will be significantly above what the Soviets deployed during their devastating Afghan War of the 1980s in which they fought some of the same insurgents now arrayed against us.

Think of the West Point speech, then, as Barack Obama's anti-MacArthur moment. In April 1951, in the midst of the Korean War, President Harry Truman relieved Douglas MacArthur of command of U.S. forces. He did so because the general, a far grander public figure than either McChrystal or CentCom commander Petraeus (and with dreams of his own about a possible presidential run), had publicly disagreed with, and interfered with, Truman's plans to "limit" the war after the Chinese intervened. Obama, too, has faced what Robert Dreyfuss in Rolling Stone calls a "generals' revolt"-amid fears that his Republican opposition would line up behind the insubordinate field commanders and make hay in the 2010 and 2012 election campaigns. Obama, too, has faced a general, Petraeus, who might well have presidential ambitions, and who has played a far subtler game than MacArthur ever did. After more than two months of what right-wing critics termed "dithering" and supporters called "thorough deliberations," Obama dealt with the problem quite differently. He essentially agreed to subordinate himself to the publicly stated wishes of his field commanders. (Not that his Republican critics will give him much credit for doing so, of course.) This is called "politics" in our country and, for a Democratic president in our era, the end result was remarkably predictable.

Monty Python in Afghanistan.

There was surprisingly little discussion about the president's decision to address the American people on Afghanistan not from the Oval Office, but from West Point. It was there, in 2002, that George W. Bush gave a speech before the a.s.sembled cadets in which he laid out his aggressive strategy of preventive war, which would become the cornerstone of the Bush Doctrine:If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long....

Our security will require transforming the military you will lead-a military that must be ready to strike at a moment's notice in any dark corner of the world. And our security will require all Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives.

But keep in mind that this was still a graduation speech and presidents have traditionally addressed one of the military academies at graduation time.

Obama is not a man who appears in prop military jackets with "commander in chief" hand-st.i.tched across his heart before hoo-aahing crowds of soldiers, as our last president loved to do, and yet he has increasingly appeared at military events and a.s.sociated himself with things military. Has a president ever, in fact, given a non-graduation speech, no less a major address to the American people, at West Point? Certainly, the choice of venue, and so the decision to address a military audience first and other Americans second, not only emphasized the escalatory military path chosen, but represented a kind of symbolic surrender of civilian authority.

For his American audience, and undoubtedly his skittish NATO allies as well, the president did put a significant emphasis on an exit strategy from the war. That off-ramp strategy was, however, placed in the context of the training of the woeful Afghan security forces to take control of the struggle themselves and of the woeful government of Afghan president Hamid Karzai turning over a new nation-building leaf. Like the choice of West Point, this, too, seemed to eerily echo George W. Bush's regularly intoned mantra: "As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down."

In his address, Obama offered July 2011 as the date to begin withdrawing the first U.S. troops from Afghanistan. ("After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.") However, according to the Washington-insider "Nelson Report," a White House on-background press briefing made it far clearer that the president was talking about a "conditions based withdrawal" that would depend "on objective conditions on the ground," on whether the Afghans had met the necessary "benchmarks." When asked about "scaling back" the American war effort, General McChrystal suggested a more conservative timeline-"sometime before 2013." Secretary of Defense Robert Gates referred vaguely to the "thinning out" of U.S. forces.

In fact, there's no reason to put faith in any of these hazy deadlines. After all, this is the administration that came into office announcing a firm one-year closing date for the U.S. prison in Guantanamo (officially missed), a firm sunshine policy for an end-of-2009 release of millions of pages of historical doc.u.ments from the archives of the CIA and other intelligence and military services (officially delayed, possibly for years), and of course a firm date for the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops, followed by all U.S. forces from Iraq (possibly slipping).

Finish the job in Afghanistan? Based on the plans of the field commanders to whom the president has bowed, on the administration's record of escalation in the war so far, and on the quiet rea.s.surances to the Pakistanis that we aren't leaving in any imaginable future, this war looks to be all job and no finish.

If it weren't so grim, despite all the upbeat benchmarks and encouraging words in the president's speech, this would certainly qualify as Monty Python in Afghanistan. After all, three cabinet ministers and twelve former ministers are under investigation in Afghanistan on corruption charges. And that barely scratches the surface of the problems in a country that one Russian expert recently referred to as an "international drug firm," where at least one-third of the gross national product comes from the drug trade. The Taliban now reportedly take a cut of the billions of dollars in U.S. development aid flowing into the country, much of which is otherwise squandered, and of the American money that goes into "protecting" the convoys that bring supplies to U.S. troops throughout the country. One out of every four Afghan soldiers has quit or deserted the Afghan National Army, while the ill-paid, largely illiterate, hapless Afghan police with their "well-deserved reputation for stealing and extorting bribes," not to speak of a drug abuse rate estimated at 15 percent, are, as it's politely put, "years away from functioning independently." Meanwhile, the insurgency is spreading to new areas of the country and reviving in others.

Airless in Washington.

Not that Washington, which obviously feels it has much to impart to the Afghan people about good governance and how to deal with corruption, has particularly firm ground to stand on. After all, in 2008, the United States completed its first billion-dollar presidential election in a $5 billion election season, and two administrations just propped up some of the worst financial scofflaws in the history of the world and got nothing back in return. Meanwhile, the money flowing into Washington political coffers from Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, the pharmaceutical and health care industries, real estate, legal firms, and the like might be thought of as a kind of drug in itself. At the same time, according to USA Today, at least 158 retired generals and admirals, many already pulling in military pensions in the range of $100,000 to $200,000, have been hired as "senior mentors" by the Pentagon "to offer advice under an unusual arrangement": they also work for companies seeking Defense Department contracts.

In Congress, a rare Senate maneuver-needing a sixty-vote super-majority to pa.s.s anything of significance-has, almost without comment, become a commonplace for the pa.s.sage of just about anything. This means Congress is eternally in a state of gridlock. And that's just for starters when it comes to ways in which the U.S. government, so ready to surge its military and its civilian employees into Afghanistan in the name of good governance, is in need of repair, if not nation-building, itself.

It's nonetheless the wisdom of this Washington and of this military that Obama has not found wanting, at least when it comes to Afghanistan. So why did he listen to them? Stop for a moment and consider the cast of characters who offered the president the full range of advice available in Washington, all of it, as far as we can tell, from Joe Biden's "counterterrorism-plus" strategy to McChrystal's COIN and beyond, escalatory in nature. Just a cursory glance at the Obama team's collective record should at least make you wonder:* Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is now said to be the official with the best ties to Afghan president Hamid Karzai, and therefore the one in charge of "coaxing" him into a round of reasonable nation-building, of making "a new compact" with the Afghan people by "improving governance and cracking down on corruption." Yet, in the early 1990s, in her single significant nation-building experience at home, she botched the possibility of getting a universal health-care bill through Congress. She also had the "wisdom" to vote in 2003 to authorize the invasion of Iraq.

* Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, reputedly deeply trusted by the president and in charge of planning out our military future in Afghanistan, was in the 1980s a supposed expert on the Soviet Union, as well as deputy CIA director and later deputy to National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft. Yet, in those years, he couldn't bring himself to believe that the Soviets were done for, even as that empire was disappearing from the face of the earth. In the words of former National Security Council official Roger Morris, Gates "waged a final battle against the Soviets, denying at every turn that the old enemy was actually dying." Former CIA official Melvin Goodman writes: "Gates was wrong about every key intelligence question of the 1980s.... A Kremlinologist by training, Gates was one of the last American hardliners to comprehend the changes taking place in the Soviet Union. He was wrong about Mikhail Gorbachev, wrong about the importance of reform, wrong about Moscow's pursuit of arms control and detente with the United States. He was wrong about the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan."

* Vice President Joe Biden, described by James Traub in the New York Times as potentially "the second-most powerful vice president in history," as well as "the president's all-purpose adviser and sage" on foreign policy, was during the Bush years a believer in nation-building in Afghanistan, voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq, and later promoted the idea-like Caesar with Gaul-of dividing that country into three parts (without, of course, bothering to ask the Iraqis), while leaving 25,000 to 30,000 American troops based there in perpetuity.

* General Stanley McChrystal, our war commander in Afghanistan and now the poster boy for counterinsurgency warfare, had his skills honed purely in the field of counterterrorism. The man who is now to "protect" the Afghan people previously won his spurs as the head of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in Iraq and Afghanistan.

* General David Petraeus, who has practically been deified in the U.S. media, is perhaps the savviest and most accomplished of this crew. His greatest skill, however, has been in fostering the career of David Petraeus. He is undoubtedly an adviser with an agenda and in his wake come a whole crew of military and think-tank experts, with almost unblemished records of being wrong in the Bush years, but to whom the surge in Iraq gave new legitimacy.

* Karl Eikenberry, our amba.s.sador to Kabul, in his previous career in the U.S. military served two tours of duty in Afghanistan, and as the commander of Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan was the general responsible for building up the Afghan army and "reforming" that country's police force. We know how effective those attempts proved.

* And then there are key figures with well-padded Washington CVs like Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, or James Jones, present national security adviser and former commandant of the Marine Corps, as well as the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, as well as a close friend of Senator John McCain, and a former revolving-door board member of Chevron and Boeing. Remind me just what sticks in your mind about their accomplishments?

So, when you think about Barack Obama's Afghan decisions, remember first that the man considered the smartest, most thoughtful president of our era chose to surround himself with these people. He chose, that is, not fresh air, or fresh thought in the field of foreign and war policy, but the airless precincts where the combined wisdom of Washington and the Pentagon now exists, and the remarkable lack of accomplishment that goes with it. In short, these are people whose credentials largely consist of not having been right about much over the years.

Admittedly, this administration has called in practically every Afghan expert in sight. Unfortunately, the most essential problem isn't in Afghanistan; it's in Washington where knowledge is slim, egos large, and conventional national security wisdom deeply imprinted on a system bleeding money and breaking down. The president campaigned on the slogan, "Change we can believe in." He then chose as advisers-in the economic sphere as well, where a similar record of gross error, narrow and unimaginative thinking, and overidentification with the powerful could easily be compiled-a crew who had never seen a significant change or an out-of-the-ordinary thought it could live with.

As a result, the Iraq War has yet to begin to go away, the Afghan War is being escalated in a major way, the Middle East is in some turmoil, Guantanamo remains open, black sites are still operating in Afghanistan, the Pentagon's budget has grown yet larger, and supplemental demands on Congress for yet more money to pay for George W. Bush's wars will, despite promises, continue.

Obama has ensured that Afghanistan, the first of Bush's disastrous wars, is now truly his war, as well.

The Nine Surges of Obama's War.

In his West Point speech, President Obama offered Americans some specifics to back up his new "way forward in Afghanistan." He spoke of the "additional 30,000 U.S. troops" he was sending into that country. He brought up the "roughly $30 billion" it would cost us to get them there and support them for a year. And finally, he spoke of beginning to bring them home by July 2011. Those were striking enough numbers, even if larger and, in terms of time, longer than many in the Democratic Party would have cared for. Nonetheless, they don't faintly cover just how fully the president has committed us to an expanding war and just how wide it is likely to become.