The 'under resourced war'

James Taranto:

A week ago we noted that President Obama was coming under pressure from the left to cut and run from Afghanistan. Now at least one voice on the right, George Will, has joined the call. We argued that Obama had helped to bring this on via a rhetorical strategy that differentiated the effort in Afghanistan from the broader war on terror--not by downplaying the former but by degrading the latter. "If there is no war on terror," we asked, "what are we doing in Afghanistan of all places?"

The White House got the message. Yesterday in what we take to have been an exchange with CBS News's Chip Reid, press secretary Robert Gibbs resurrected the war on terror:

Reid: I believe it was March when the president announced his new strategy in Afghanistan, and since then things have only gotten worse. This July and August, I believe, have been the two worst months in terms of U.S. fatalities. Obviously it takes a long time to implement a military strategy, but after six months not only are things not stabilized but they're worse--they've gotten worse during that period of time. Is this an early sign that his strategy is not working?

Gibbs: No, Chip, we under-resourced Afghanistan for the better part of a decade. OK?

Reid: But now he's sending in additional troops and it's getting worse.

Gibbs: Well, and not all those additional troops are there. The assessment that is coming back is part of what a new commander does when they go to a region when they're newly assigned, as the president has Gen. McChrystal to this region.

But understand, Chip, we are not--the president, whether it's the economy, health care, or anything, isn't going to--we're not going to make--we're not going to see the entire thing turn around in a few months, after years and years of neglect. You can't under-resource the most important part of our war on terror, you can't under-resource that for five or six or seven years--whether it's under-resourced with troops, whether it's under-resourced with civilian manpower, whether it's under-resourced with economic development funding--and hope to snap your fingers and have that turn around in just a few months.

The we-inherited-it-from-Bush dodge is tiresome even when there is truth to it. In the case of Afghanistan, however, there is no question that Obama has made things worse, at least on the domestic front. He inherited from Bush a consensus that Afghanistan was the "good war," a war worth fighting and a war we had to win. That consensus can no longer be counted on. It is possible that Obama's own party will stage a revolt against the war he promised to win.

Surely this is in large part because Obama got distracted from the war on terror--by the left's demands for a war against the war on terror (Guantanamo, interrogation, etc.) and by his own mad ambitions to seize control of the medical system. Little wonder that even the Puffington Host is now taking seriously the possibility of Dick Cheney's challenging Obama in 2012--and this is absent any indication that Cheney takes the possibility seriously.

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Gibbs has to skip over a lot of history to get to his "under resourced war" claim. For starters he needs to look at the former head of Centcom, John Abizaid who believed in the "small foot print" and managed to under resource both Iraq and Afghanistan. That was his strategy and no one really challenged him on it until Bush decided on the surge after getting input from people outside the chain of command. At that point Iraq was the more critical war and needed the surge more.

By the time Obama came in Bush was already increasing the troops in Afghanistan, but left it to the new President to decide how man. Obama split the baby and under resourced troops at a time when more were needed to deal with the recent elections.

It is still not clear that Obama is going to provide the needed resources. He has squandered so much of his political capital on stimulus spending and a health care program that many do not want, that he may not be able to bring his own party on board for additional troop request. The same Democrats who were wrong about the surge in Iraq seem ready to be wrong again in Afghanistan. It is going to take leadership Obama has not demonstrated to date to bring them on board.