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A few days before Richard Holbrooke made his infamous August 2009 “we’ll know success when we see it” comment about identifying success in Afghanistan, I had a conversation with an administration official about the Afghanistan strategy. It was nominally a journalistic activity but mostly shit-shooting. Official X observed the precipitous contemporaneous drop in public opinion on the war with a variation on the following comment: One lesson of the March strategy review is that if you consistently talk to the public about the war and its relationship to the national interest, then the public will support the strategy. But if the administration talks about the war every couple of months with the public and shelves it inbetween, you can’t expect people to stay receptive to the strategy. After all, if it’s so important, how can you only discuss it intermittently?
I recalled that conversation when watching Obama’s Deepwater Horizon speech, when he momentarily talked about the troops taking the fight to al-Qaeda worldwide, as if there weren’t 90-something thousand troops in Afghanistan. And that was the highest-profile discussion Obama devoted to Afghanistan since the West Point speech in December, unless you count May’s visit from President Karzai, which I doubt many people outside of Washington noticed. So: so much for consistent public presidential discussion of Afghanistan.
Look, I want to live in a world of faceless institutions, in which the machinery of government grinds onward after a country makes a national commitment and a democracy doesn’t need to have its attention stroked and rallied by a man in a High Office and journalists don’t whine about What Presidents Need To Say. But we don’t live in that world, and we have still committed enormous resources to Afghanistan, so none of us get to have our preferences.
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What obscenity. It is all about the propaganda? These stupid, fickle “people” who needed to prodded continuously to support mass murder. If only they were more sheepish. Then there are the tens of thousands of mercenaries in Afghanistan who fail at everything except cost overruns. Of course, blame Obama for “intermittently” supporting this bloody and expensive disaster.
This “Administration Official” has contempt for the American and at the same time disloyalty to his President. Why is he/she anonymous? No courage of convictions to publicly criticize Obama’s poor war propaganda? How many times must it be said about these oil wars? It is not about Information Control. It is about permanent wars in the mideast and fascism in the USA.
This is a great point. The speech wasn’t good, and was obviously received as though it were horrible, which it wasn’t – expectations, and it being ONLY A SPEECH were the main reasons for the reception. But one reasonable assessment I did hear – to be fair, on a right-centerish podcast (James Joyner’s) – was that it “contained too many topics.” This is fair, I believe. Not that the president shouldn’t be attempting to communicate on a variety of topics right now. God knows, we face an array of monumental challenges right now that is simply mindboggling. But you can’t get to all of that in one twenty-minute address that is meant to deal with a discreet crisis. The fact that so many of them needed to be included on Tuesday bespeaks the fact the president is not currently communicating effectively across that variety of topics to the American people in the appropriate settings and fora. The president is simply underperforming in his public role at this time. They’ve been in bunker mode for a month and a half and are simply not engaged enough with core national concerns. Afghanistan is one example. (The sheer variety of and lack of progress on concurrent policy problems facing our country has me mostly convinced now that the decision to attempt COIN was the wrong decision in the context of broad national interest. It was inevitable, but it was likely wrong.) The failure to do anything to shake off the conventional wisdom that economic recovery efforts have been sufficient is a more important second. The president needs to begin to command much more of the public attention on the full spectrum of issues starting immediately.
On the other hand if we’re going to send troops overseas to kill and be killed it’s probably wiser to remind the citizens. I had enough “painless war” under the previous administration, thank you.