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Obama Won’t Repeat Iraq Mistakes in Afghanistan–McCain Will |
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It is significant that Barack Obama began his much-discussed trip abroad in Afghanistan, not Iraq.  in recent days, Obama has succeeded in shifting debate from Iraq to Afghanistan, while McCain has struggled to keep up, essentially doing his best to adopt Obama’s point that more troops are needed in Afghanistan. While the media has essentially forgotten about Afghanistan, Obama has been arguing for months that Bush and McCain’s obsession with Iraq caused us to take our eye off Afghanistan and Pakistan–a region that actually has something to do with getting Bin Laden and Al Qaeda.Â
Until very recently, McCain rejected this view, repeatedly calling Iraq “the central front in the war on terror” and dismissing calls to redeploy troops to Afghanistan. After Obama’s recent speech arguing that the misguided war in Iraq distracted us from Afghanistan and Pakistan, and calling for a new strategy that would take the fight to Al Qaeda in its safe haven, McCain claimed he, too, would move troops from Iran to Afghanistan (though he quickly “revised” his position, ambiguously suggesting some of new troops might come from other countries.)Â
Seth Colter Walls at Huffington Post rightly concludes that McCain is adrift here, furiously trying to out-Obama on Obama. Much of the rest of the media, however, focuses on McCain’s chest-thumping claim that he “knows how to win wars” and will solve the problem simply by doing in Afghanistan exactly what has been done in Iraq.Â
McCain’s rhetoric completely misses the mark. First, we haven;t won anything–the surge that McCain keeps bragging about started 18 months ago and, while the military did exactly what it was asked to do, there is still no end in sight in Iraq. As Obama put it, what Bush and McCain have is a strategy for keeping our troops in Iraq, not for ending the war there.Â
Obama has also aptly observed that we can’t make the mistake of “fighting the last war.” That is what we have done in Iraq, and that’s the misplaced approach McCain promises to transfer to Afghanistan. This gets to the very core of our failed response to the 9/11 attacks. Bush and McCan thought, and think, that the correct response is to fight conventional wars aimed at defeating nation-states. This is a nonsensical approach–Al Qaeda, of course, is not a country and is not defeated when one country’s army is subdued. Our military ends up in long, unwinnable counter-insurgency campaigns.
Obama recognizes that, while more troops in Afghanistan can help achieve specific objectives, that is not enough. We need to use much more focused tools that allow us to target terrorists. That means developing intelligence that tells us precisely where Al Qaeda is and then taking them out.Â
Obama’s speech makes clear that he understands, no matter how effective our military is, we cannot succeed by military force alone. We need to be smarter, we need to strengthen frayed alliances, we need to understand that long-term military occupations can end up making us less safe, above all, we need to learn from the mistakes made in Iraq. McCain thinks that Iraq is a model for future action. The last thing Americans want to see is the Iraq experience replicated somewhere else.
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