White House Prepares to Send 30,000 to Afghanistan

WASHINGTON, Nov. 22 — As we go to press, we are learning that President Barack Obama has begun issuing the formal orders related to his decision to send 30,000 more soldiers to Afghanistan in order to expand the eight-year-old occupation of the country.

After months of discussing options with his “war council,” Obama decided to expand the occupation by increasing U.S. involvement in the central Asian country by nearly 50 percent. The total U.S. presence in Afghanistan after this escalation is complete will come close to the peak number of Soviet troops stationed in the country in the 1980s.

This “surge” in troops is the second expansion of U.S. occupation forces ordered by Obama since he took office in January. A few weeks after assuming power, Obama sent 21,000 troops over to Afghanistan.

Mobilization orders were expected to precede Obama’s formal announcement of the escalation of the Afghan occupation before the cadets of the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. Obama is clearly choosing an audience he knows will not offer a hint of visual or verbal opposition to his plan for expanding the occupation.

Obama’s decision to speak as the “commander in chief” and not as the president also signals tacit agreement with the transformation of relations between the military and government — and the military and society — initiated by the George W. Bush regime in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

With the implementation of the corporatist model of capitalism, it has been necessary to place a societal wedge between civilians and soldiers, casting the latter as a fundamentally separate social group and drawing it closer to the exploiting and oppressing classes in much the same way they do with police officers and court officials.

In the days and weeks prior to Obama making his decision, his fellow Democrats in Congress and friendly elements in the corporate media have waged a clumsy but generally effective propaganda war to rally “public opinion” in favor of escalation.

Stories about Afghanistan being the “war of necessity” because of the Sept. 11 attacks began appearing in print and on television, and both commentators and public officials began to soften their rhetoric against the ineffective puppet regime of Hamid Karzai, which just began its second term under a dark cloud of illegitimacy.

By far, though, the most effective piece of propaganda issued in the days preceding this decision was a well-timed report from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee detailing the botched attempt to capture Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Tora Bora along the eastern border with Pakistan in December 2001. This report details how a lack of enough troops and unwillingness to use available resources to “get the job done” allowed bin Laden to escape Afghanistan.

(In addition to supporting the rationale for the new “surge” in troops, this report is also being used as an after-the-fact justification for continued unmanned drone attacks across the border into Talib’an-held areas in the northwestern regions of Pakistan.)

Obama had four choices in front of him, in terms of what to do in Afghanistan: 1) maintain current levels as is, 2) go a “Vietnamization” route and send only advisers and trainers to build up the Afghan forces, 3) begin withdrawal of all occupation forces, or 4) escalate by sending more troops.

The first two options had become infeasible because of the material situation on the ground. So, in the end, his two choices were either expansion or withdrawal of forces.

Withdrawal would have mean admitting that the last eight years were a failure — a de facto defeat for Washington. It would also mean that the U.S. nearly destroyed its fighting capacity for nothing, and the years it would take to rebuild would be overshadowed by this blunder and its after effects.

Escalation, on the other hand, would demonstrate to the capitalists and their “middle class” managers the White House’s commitment to continue fighting for their interests, even when the fight is unwinable.

But to agree to escalation would also mean that Obama would have to “own” the war and take responsibility for its success.

And “own” he has. Afghanistan has become Obama’s war, just like Iraq was Bush’s war.

The pending announcement of the Afghanistan escalation also sheds light on why, in recent months, Obama backed away from previous statements he made about job creation, health care “reform” and education.

Like with Lyndon Johnson and his “Great Society” reforms of the 1960s, Obama is having to put aside all of his plans in order to pay for an escalating military conflict.

Looking at all of this in context, it is perhaps no surprise, then, that so many of those who supported Obama last year are beginning to acknowledge that we were right when we called him “Bush’s Third Term.”