If you’re looking for hope — and, since it’s always a campaign year, change — you could find both in President Barack Obama’s prime-time speech on Afghanistan.
It was about time.
The hope is that Obama has finally escaped the clutches of his office and has determined — as he must have always known — that endless war really isn’t the way home.
If the “tide of war” is really receding, as he said, that would represent real change, fundamental change.
The speech, of course, did not exist in a vacuum. It had much to do, I’m sure, with the polls showing a country tired of the long war in Afghanistan.
The polls also show people aren’t thrilled by the so-called non-hostilities in Libya, even if Americans aren’t being killed there.
Americans are worried about America, which seems about right. It isn’t isolationism, as John “Let’s Fight ‘Em All” McCain would have it. It’s that we’ve been fighting big land wars for the wrong reasons — fighting terrorism just isn’t a big-land-war kind of war — and that we obviously have real issues to figure out at home.
As you’ve heard from the speech, Obama announced 10,000 troops are coming home from Afghanistan by the end of the year and 23,000 more by next summer. These are the 33,000 so-called “West Point surge” troops.
That still leaves 68,000 troops, though, in Afghanistan, or double the number that were there when Obama took office. That’s when Obama made the war in Afghanistan his war.
It’s a war that will cost $113 billion this year and, even with reductions, cost an estimated $106 billion next year. The greater costs — human costs — are still to be counted.
Can we really afford any of that? Is it really necessary in the era of insect-sized drones to have 68,000 troops in Afghanistan? Everyone understands, from generals on down, that there’s no military solution there. We’ve given up on the idea of nation-building. It’s hard, at times, to even be sure there’s a recognizable government there.
And yet, by Washington standards, this drawdown is heady stuff. It’s stuff that Gen. David Petraeus apparently opposed — although apparently not strongly enough to pass up his new job as head of the CIA. It’s stuff that Robert Gates and Hillary Rodham Clinton also opposed.
It’s no accident that we know the players in this White House game. Obama wants to move responsibly, of course, and he also wants to be seen as moving faster than many on his team want him to.
The experts say that the progress made in Afghanistan is fragile and that moving too quickly could put that all at risk. Obama knows that. But he has to know, too, that it’s time to end a decade of war.
The stakes have changed. Osama bin Laden is dead — killed in Pakistan. There is the Arab spring, which seems like a much greater threat to radical Islam than even American drones.
There are now Democrats and Republicans saying we need to get out of Afghanistan. Certainly, the Afghan government is not much of an ally. And President Hamid Karzai’s idea of campaigning is to bash America’s role in his country whenever possible.
There are reasons to be there, certainly, and not simply because of the obvious reason we went to Afghanistan nearly 10 years ago — to wipe out the al-Qaeda camps after 9/11 and to get bin Laden.
That the Iraq war came between the invasion of Afghanistan and bin Laden’s recent departure is something that will intrigue future historians. Nothing there is easy, of course. Getting out of Afghanistan now relies, the experts will tell you, on figuring out how to make sure that Pakistan doesn’t become the new haven for terrorism.
This stuff can be so difficult that Obama, the law professor, finds himself twisted in legal knots in trying to avoid the War Powers Act and explain how the fighting in Libya doesn’t amount to “hostilities.”
He made a different case in the speech. He talked about “reclaiming the American dream” — as presidents are wont to do — and put that reclamation project in stark terms.
“Over the last decade, we have spent $1 trillion on war, at a time of rising debt and hard economic times,” Obama said. “America, it is time to focus on nation-building here at home.”
Most Americans, I think, had already figured that out.
We’re still waiting to see whether the White House is ready to make the change.
Contact Mike Littwin at mlittwin@denverpost.com.
