As the Obama administration deliberates on what strategy and how many resources to commit or implement in Afghanistan, there has been growing comparisons between Obama’s dilemma and Bush’s prior to the Iraqi surge. Though the comparison has several important leaks, there is much to discern in both President’s leadership styles and decision making methods. The best piece on this subject I have read is this article by The New Republic’s Michael Crowley. I highly recommend reading the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt:
Then there is the overriding question of just what the U.S. mission in Afghanistan really is. In Iraq, the Bushies offered vague talk of driving out Al Qaeda and setting up a stable government that could defend its own borders. Obama’s March address about the Afghanistan war was even cloudier, with a rhetorical emphasis on rooting out Al Qaeda–but also a call for a civilian surge to “advance security, opportunity and justice” for the Afghan people. (Bushian references to freedom and democracy have largely been retired, however.) Asked at a recent press event to describe success in Afghanistan, meanwhile, Holbrooke found a clear answer elusive. “We’ll know it when we see it,” he said.
But, if the definition of success isn’t clear to the Obama team, the definition of defeat may be. Bush argued unabashedly that Iraq had become “the central front in the war on terror” and that withdrawing before the country had stabilized would hand Al Qaeda not only a strategic but a moral victory. Current administration officials don’t publicly articulate the same rationale when discussing Afghanistan. But former CIA official Bruce Riedel, a regional expert who led the White House’s Afghanistan-Pakistan review earlier this year, cited it at the Brookings panel held in August. “The triumph of jihadism or the jihadism of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in driving NATO out of Afghanistan would resonate throughout the Islamic World. This would be a victory on par with the destruction of the Soviet Union in the 1990s,” Riedel said. “[T]he stakes are enormous.”
