US media would like to pretend that the “surge” they supported in Afghanistan never happened. (cc photo: US Army/ Michael Casteel)
What is Barack Obama’s record on the Afghan War? Judging by some recent press, the main lesson is that he’s ending that war. But that requires ignoring some pretty inconvenient history.
On ABC‘s This Week (1/19/14), the New Yorker‘s David Remnick objected to Mary Matalin’s suggestion that Obama is similar to Dick Cheney. Nothing wrong with that, but he started off by saying this:
The historical analogy between Dick Cheney and, with respect, and Barack Obama, is absurd. I mean, this is a president who’s withdrawn from two wars.
And here’s Washington Post reporter Scott Wilson (1/17/14) placing the Afghan War in the category of policies that demonstrate how Obama broke with the Bush record:
Having run for office as a critic of the Bush administration’s national security policies, Obama was always going to be measured, in part, by how he scaled back the excesses of post-9/11 national security practices and preserved the essentials in a still-dangerous world. The reviews on that account have been mixed.
Obama withdrew US troops from Iraq, a conflict he once called a “dumb war,” and has set an end-of-the-year end date for US participation in Afghanistan’s war.
At the same time, he has expanded the battlefield for the US drone fleet and stepped up the tempo of strikes from the Bush years, another counterterrorism tool that many within his party say should have far more accountability and oversight.
The problem is that in focusing on how Obama might end the Afghan War—which hasn’t ended, of course—these accounts omit the fact that Obama massively increased the number of US troops in Afghanistan—from about 32,000 to about 100,000 (FAIR Blog, 11/25/13). This isn’t an obscure fact—but it does muddy up the narrative that Obama made a serious break with Bush foreign policy.
When Obama was considering whether to further increase troop levels he had already raised in Afghanistan, corporate media largely ignored the option of withdrawal (Extra!, 3/09). Since then, more than 10,000 Afghan civilians have been killed in the fighting, along with more than 1,600 US fighters and uncounted Afghan combatants—and the US is concluding that the war is unwinnable after all. It’s unsurprising that now the media would like to pretend that never happened.
Considering troops were withdrawn from Iraq based on the SOFA signed during the Bush admin — an agreement the Obama admin tried to get extended but couldn’t thanks to Chelsea Manning’s leaks — you can’t credit Obama for getting out of Iraq either.
The media misleads on Obama’s Iraq record as much as — if not more than — it does his Afghanistan record.
The erasure of Obama’s decisions about Afghanistan started before he took office. Look at the big, celebratory issue of The Nation from just after he was elected in 2008 about where the nation (i.e. the country, not the magazine) was headed after being liberated from the Bush nightmare. The word “Afghanistan”, as far as I could tell, did not appear a single time in the entire issue.
Neither flavor of Beltway yapper has ever had much use for the reality of Obama and his wars. What limited honor for truth-telling is due, should go to those Bush alumni and other right-wingers who credit Obama for keeping the faith. Glenn Greenwald has noted that many times.
It is obvious War-chickens are trying to praise him for doing what they want – more war, more troops – while the rest of Corpse_press would just like to forget it all, and thus not have to face the reality of their complacency.
Obama didn’t exactly withdraw troops from Iraq. He wanted to keep a number of them there, but the Iraqi leader would not go along with keeping them exempt from Iraqi law. We were basically asked to leave.
Too many pretend to forget that one of O’s first decisions as CoC was to send another 34,000 troops in March 2009 to what he called the “right war.” Then Lesser Evil apologists pretend that his second escalation of another 30,000 in December was only because he was “boxed in” by the Pentagon.
http://www.michaelmunk.com
I will never forget a speech in which candidate Obama called the Afghan war ” the good war.” Because that’s when I knew I could never vote for this war monger.
And remember how the military leaked their memo demanding 40,000 more troops as necessary for an effective fight in Afghanistan? That pressured Obama to raise the troop levels by 32,000, when he had planned to commit far fewer. He was about to take Biden’s advice over Petraeus’.
The Pentagon leakers were not disciplined or arrested for leaking state secrets. They were leaking, after all, in an attempt to expand a war rather than expose its folly. That’s seen as patriotic, not criminal.