Say Anything Blog

As Abe Greenwald notes, the two wars aren’t all that different:

If immediate withdrawal was the best way to inspire Iraqis to sort out their own bloody differences, does that not hold for Afghans? After all, we’ve been in Afghanistan longer than in Iraq and the question of civil war there is so academic it’s not even questioned.

By staying on this long, are we not broadcasting our willingness to do the Afghans’ hard work for them? Why have no benchmarks been drawn up to gauge Afghan progress and hasten our exit?

In July 2007, Obama said, the risk of increasing violence in Iraq “are even greater if we continue to occupy Iraq and serve as a magnet for not only terrorist activity but also irresponsible behavior by Iraqi factions.” If he’s worried about American presence as a “terrorist magnet,” then he has yet another reason to want out of Afghanistan. On July 10, the New York Times reported that jihadists have recently been flocking to the tribal areas of Pakistan, “seeking to take up arms against the West,” — namely coalition forces in Afghanistan. Why not leave?

Of course, Barack Obama has referred to “the distraction of the war in Iraq at a time when we could have pinned down the people who actually committed 9/11.” But the people who “committed 9/11″ are, by all reputable accounts, not in Afghanistan. The surviving few are in Pakistan. And though Obama likes to conflate a troop increase in Afghanistan with a plan to take control of Pakistan’s tribal region, the two are not the same. He simply has no plan for the latter.

The problem with this analysis is that it assumes that Obama is formulating his foreign policy pronouncements based on a desire to find the best policy instead of a desire to pander to certain political factions.

If we consider that Obama is just pandering, it becomes clear why he’d support the war in Afghanistan but oppose the war in Iraq.  One position is politically tenable with his far-left base.  The other isn’t.