Is Obama getting It All Wrong In Afghanistan?

If President Obama took some time out on his vacation today to read the NY Times Week in Review, he couldn't have been too pleased with Peter Baker's column, Could Afghanistan Become Obama's Vietnam?

[T]he L.B.J. model-- a president who aspired to reshape America at home while fighting a losing war abroad-- is one that haunts Mr. Obama’s White House as it seeks to salvage Afghanistan while enacting an expansive domestic program.

In this summer of discontent for Mr. Obama, as the heady early days give way to the grinding battle for elusive goals, he looks ahead to an uncertain future not only for his legislative agenda but for what has indisputably become his war. Last week’s elections in Afghanistan played out at the same time as the debate over health care heated up in Washington, producing one of those split-screen moments that could not help but remind some of Mr. Johnson’s struggles to build a Great Society while fighting in Vietnam.

“The analogy of Lyndon Johnson suggests itself very profoundly,” said David M. Kennedy, the Stanford University historian. Mr. Obama, he said, must avoid letting Afghanistan shadow his presidency as Vietnam did Mr. Johnson’s. “He needs to worry about the outcome of that intervention and policy and how it could spill over into everything else he wants to accomplish.”

...Just as Mr. Johnson believed he had no choice but to fight in Vietnam to contain communism, Mr. Obama last week portrayed Afghanistan as the bulwark against international terrorism. “This is not a war of choice,” he told the Veterans of Foreign Wars at their convention in Phoenix. “This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which Al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans.”

But while many Americans once shared that view, polls suggest that conviction is fading nearly eight years into the war. The share of Americans who said the war in Afghanistan was worth fighting slipped below 50 percent in a survey released last week by the Washington Post and ABC News. A July poll by the New York Times and CBS News showed that 57 percent of Americans think things are going badly for the United States in Afghanistan, compared with 33 percent who think they are going well.

And those numbers are far worse among Democrats-- and in you take out the Obama-hating Old Confederacy, there's very little support for Obama's policies in Afghanistan.

As though it weren't enough that there is a growing perception among Americans who can locate Afghanistan on a map and who follow the conflict there, that the U.S. is propping up an unspeakably corrupt regime of warlords and drug barons, it is now apparent to anyone who cares to look, that the election last week was a mockery and complete sham. The doctored results are likely to result in ethnic conflict between Pashtuns and Tajiks. When I was living in Afghanistan in the late 1960s, I was struck that everyone I met outside of Kabul denied that there even was an Afghanistan and pretty much saw the king's central government as just the government of Kabul.

Local officials in southern provinces have been “stuffing ballot boxes” in favor of President Hamid Karzai, Abdullah, the chief challenger, said today at a Kabul press conference. While voting in the ethnic-Pashtun south was very light due to Taliban attacks, ballot boxes from many districts are arriving with votes for Karzai that number four times or more the initially reported turnout, Abdullah said.

Election monitoring groups also have reported voting misconduct in favor of Karzai, though Abdullah’s fraud complaint was the broadest and most specific yet. It assured that the results to be announced beginning this week will be contested before the country’s Electoral Complaints Commission, a five-man panel headed by a Canadian elections specialist.

A battle over the vote results may undermine efforts by the U.S. and its allies to assure a credible, publicly accepted election that will strengthen the government politically in its U.S.-backed fight against Taliban guerrillas.

Sit back and watch the new video released last week by BraveNewFilms that starts with a statement by Bob Baer, a former CIA officer that "the notion that we're in Afghanistan to make our country safer is just complete bullshit." His contention is that U.S. involvement in that hellhole has only served to push the Taliban into the mountains and al Qaeda into Pakistan, destabilizing the region and putting Americans in greater jeopardy because of the new threat of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal falling into the hands of extremists. Obama should move up his timetable for extricating the U.S. from an unwinnable war with no clear goals and rapidly diminishing support in his own country, a dire threat to his ambitious domestic agenda.