Turning from Iraq to Afghanistan, signs of Obama's softer power

The symbolic contrast could not have been more telling. Although he designated this week's withdrawal of American combat troops from Iraqi cities as an "important milestone," President Obama nevertheless piggybacked -- with "little fanfare," as the New York Times observed -- on another White House ceremony to make the announcement.

The semi-distinguished occasion was what you might call a necessary farce -- an exiting proverbial whimper, not a bang; a toe-tagging of peremptory imperial stupidity; a body-outline-chalking of six years of inclusive, colossal waste.

Yet the underlying farce endures, and no one knows that better than the stage managers and script writers of Obama's announcement. "Now make no mistake," said the president. "There will be difficult days ahead. We know that violence in Iraq will continue," although he married that certain knowledge to a rhetorical confidence that Iraqi insurgents would, in time, whither away.

Perhaps -- in a century, or a millenium. But, soft power willing, we'll be long gone before sectarian Iraqis come to their senses. And in that confidence, I think, Obama's is more than rhetorical. This was a phallocratic war that only the insular, underdeveloped neoconservative mind could have conceived; and, love him or hate him, one can't peg the worldly Obama with immature parochialism.

He wants out, bad, because he knows that our staying in will accomplish no good. Iraq, unsurprisingly, is an Iraqi problem.

But what of Afghanistan? Is that an Afghan problem? To me it is -- mostly, anyway -- but I'm not running for reelection against war-whooping Republicans who have never been shy about exploiting every possible sign of Democratic weakness on national security. One would like to think the GOP's public credibility is somewhere below Bernie Madoff's, but when it comes to cheap, nationalistic sensationalism, the party retains a latent appeal.

So, distressing as it was to watch Obama transport 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, political realities further eased suspicion that the president is a True Believer. And yesterday, writing in the Washington Post, Bob Woodward largely confirmed our transcendent hopes.

In "Key in Afghanistan: Economy, Not Military," amid its boilerplate reportage about how the Obama administration is determined to "[carry] out the ... approved strategy of increased economic development, improved governance and participation by the Afghan military and civilians," there were looming passages that indeed tended, in my mind, to authenticate Obama's softer-power inclinations and longer-term intent.

First, Woodward was told "privately," as he was meant to publish it, by "one senior military officer ... that the United States would have to deploy a force of more than 100,000 to execute the counterinsurgency strategy of holding areas and towns after clearing out the Taliban insurgents." And that balloon-popping assertion was coupled with that of National Security adviser Jim Jones, who, spending part of last week in Afghanistan to consult with U.S. commanders, added that "We are not going to build that empire again," in instructional reference to our Afghanistan mission's dissimilarity to Iraq's.

What's more, virtually everything that Jones told Woodward, directly and indirectly, "seem[ed] designed," wrote Woodward, "to cap expectations that more troops might be coming." For instance, for the enlightening benefit of some U.S. commanders who had grumbled about insufficient manpower, Jones related with very unnostalgic, unVietnamlike poignancy "how Obama had initially decided to deploy additional forces this year."

"The president's principals met [in February] and agreed to recommend 17,000 more troops for Afghanistan," which Obama approved, said Jones. Then -- "oops," Jones' characterization -- "we need an additional 4,000 to help train the Afghan army," which Obama also approved.

"Now suppose you're the president, Jones told them, and the requests come into the White House for yet more force.... Well, Jones went on, after all those additional troops, 17,000 plus 4,000 more, if there were new requests for force now, the president would quite likely have 'a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment.' Everyone in the room caught the phonetic reference to WTF -- which in the military and elsewhere means "What the [expletive-undeleted] fuck?' "

We can't know, of course. Maybe we, and Woodward, were being conned; maybe Jones' traveling stage directions were as artfully managed as Obama's East Room announcement, and maybe there's a decade's worth of more American blood to come. We just can't know. But my money, gambled, admittedly, largely on instinct, is on Obama's soft power.