It’s that time of the year again, when attacks advertisements blare on the television and political talking-heads start having that vein in their temple pulsate: election season. When it comes to the war in Afghanistan, many Americans are more worried about their pocketbooks and thus have ignored the issue. Many of President Barack Obama’s liberal fans feel betrayed by his administration’s troop surge and may just stay home on Election Day.

About half of all registered voters are likely to go to the polls next Tuesday to vote for local representatives, congressmen and senators, a process that will shift legislative priorities substantially. In January 2009, there was a change in leadership in the White House, but no leadership changes in the Pentagon. To that end, Obama’s latest strategy in Afghanistan is based on the 2006 surge in Iraq, which helped pacify large sections of the country. But Afghanistan is not Iraq.

Obama needs to truly assert himself as the commander in chief, telling the Pentagon what to do and not vice-versa. Instead of an additional 30,000 troops for a broad and vague counterinsurgency campaign, the main focus of Obama’s Afghanistan war policy should be the dismantling of the entire al-Qaeda network, conditional reconciliation with the Taliban to help ensure stable governance, and a commitment of aid to help build schools, instead of drop bombs.

The recent news of reconciliation talks between the United States and the Taliban is an encouraging sign that our leaders understand the Taliban is not our immediate enemy. The Taliban, as an organization, is a beast of America’s own making. We invested billions in weapons funding and insurgency training for the mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight off the Soviet invasion in the 1980s. When this group of ‘freedom fighters’ won and Soviet tanks withdrew, so did American support. The country had lots of weapons, with little in the way of effective governance or schools.

To fill this power and education vacuum, the former mujahideen fighter, Mullah Omar, formed the Taliban, which was supplemented with fighters from radical Islamist madrassas, schools that preached violent jihad while the country reverted to an Islamic theocracy based on fringe ideas that most Muslims wouldn’t even recognize as Islamic. One wonders how things would be different in Afghanistan had we invested in education and governance in 1989.

Contrary to liberal belief, the solution is not to end the war immediately and withdraw troops. We’ve done that already, and it created a radicalized failed state that allowed al-Qaeda in the 1990s to come to Afghanistan to train and plan the 9/11 attacks.

The real problem I have with the war effort is its lack of focus. We know the Taliban was complicit in allowing al-Qaeda a safe haven, but we also know they were rather wary of these Arab jihadists bothering the United States. Unfortunately, former President George W. Bush administration’s invasion in 2001 pushed these two groups together, and we have failed to distinguish the two ever since.

So let’s get al-Qaeda. It is likely in the border regions between Afghanistan and Pakistan, a region where Obama has ordered more drone strikes than Bush ever did, which shows he understands the real mission in the area.

We need to work with the shaky governments in both countries, so let’s try to encourage stability without being overly interventionist. Iraq was a complete waste of our time and resources from which Obama wisely extricated all of our combat troops this past summer. He needs to focus the efforts in Afghanistan on creating a functional civil society. One that blends a traditionally decentralized political structure with a central government that has authority and holds free elections, not the ones marred with fraud that we saw recently under the corrupt President Hamid Karzai. Similarly, we should reach out to Pakistan in a very big way as it recovers from its terrible summer of flooding, because massive disasters are often breeding grounds for more radicalism.

But a world away, the choices Obama and other political leaders make affect who lives and dies, whether it be more American troops, more children, more tribal leaders or more al-Qaeda militants.

Luke Lanciano is a junior political science major. His column appears every Tuesday, and he can be reached at lllanci@syr.edu.

 

Published on October 27, 2010 at 12:00 pm