Word: backings
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...understand Barack Obama's Afghanistan decision, it's instructive to go back to one history-shifting sentence, uttered by his predecessor more than eight years ago. It was Sept. 20, 2001. The nation was in agony, and George W. Bush stood before a joint session of Congress, telling Americans where to direct their rage. "Americans are asking, 'Who attacked our country?'" Bush declared early in his remarks. "The evidence we have gathered all points to a collection of loosely affiliated terrorist organizations known as al-Qaeda." (See pictures of the battle against the Taliban...
...Obama, this is the original sin whose consequences must now be repaired. His foreign policy in the greater Middle East amounts to an elaborate effort to peel back eight years of onion in hopes of finding the war on terrorism's lost inner core: the struggle against al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda alone. That's the subtext underlying his new Afghan strategy. He's raising troop levels, but less to vanquish the Taliban than to gain the leverage to effectively negotiate with them - in hopes of isolating alQaeda from its Afghan allies. He's boosting America's means but narrowing...
...Obama's foreign policy, in fact, looks a lot like Richard Nixon's in the latter years of Vietnam, which sought to scale down another foreign policy doctrine - containment - that had gotten out of hand. And Nixon's experience offers both a warning and an example: pulling back from your predecessor's overblown commitments can be vital. The risk is that it can make you look weak or immoral, or both...
...Obama is also shrinking the war on terrorism because, although he won't say so out loud, he's scaled back Bush's assessment of American power. When Bush invaded Iraq, the U.S. was coming off a decade of low-cost military triumphs - from Panama in 1989 to the Gulf War in 1991 to Bosnia in 1995 to Kosovo in 1999. And back then, Afghanistan looked like a triumph too. It was easy to believe that the U.S. military - through a combination of force and threats of force - could prevail over a slew of hostile regimes and movements...
...second problem with Obama's agenda is that although he wants to cut deals with regimes like Iran's and movements like the Taliban, he's not in a particularly strong position to do so. Back in 2002 or 2003, when the U.S. looked almost invincible, the Iranians appeared willing to concede a lot simply to forestall a U.S. attack. Now, with the U.S. mired in Afghanistan and Iraq, they are less afraid and thus less willing to deal. Similarly, the Taliban have little incentive to break with al-Qaeda so long as they feel they're gaining momentum...