Obama cannot answer a political question with a military response

If you want to know what "success" looks like in an American-tailored Middle East nation, look to Iraq.

There, after years of grinding determination, a peppy escalation, 4,500 dead Americans and roughly one trillion dollars, they're blowing themselves up again with distressing pre-escalation, pre-success vigor, as evidenced most recently in Sunday's Baghdad car bombings, killing more than 150 and wounding 500. Two months ago, just a few blocks away, car bombings killed more than 100.

The NY Times reported Sunday's "incident" somewhat eulogistically, writing that that nation's leader, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, "has painstakingly tried to present Iraq as having turned a corner on the violence that threatened to tear the country apart." And just about all this nation's leader, Barack Obama, could do was to issue a statement assuring Iraqis that we stand with them, while reminding them that they're pretty much on their own.

In brief, our much-neoconservatively vaunted success in Iraq has been nullified and reversed. With American troops out of the way, the nation is reverting to its traditionally violent, ethno-sectarian ways. And once our combat troops are completely gone, it will be as though they were never there. Thousands dead, hundreds of billions spent -- for nothing.

So naturally a military escalation is just what we need in Afghanistan. Reports the Times this morning: while "other options" remain available to Obama, "the debate," according to administration officials, "is no longer over whether to send more troops, but how many more will be needed."

How many more? Well, let's see ... How many do we have? According to textbook counterinsurgency theory we need about a half-million-plus, just to keep a U.S.-resourced lid on indigenous-Afghan explosions. But that's fantastically unrealistic, so let's just throw whatever we have at it.

First, however, let's play some war games to help determine and then shape Afghanistan's alternate future reality (is all this beginning to sound familiar?). Which is what the Pentagon has been doing this month, pondering through the assistance of really nifty computer simulations, I'm sure, "the likely outcome of inserting 44,000 more troops into the country to conduct a full-scale [though not actually 'full-scale'] counterinsurgency effort," or "adding 10,000 to 15,000 more soldiers and Marines as part of an approach that the military has dubbed 'counterterrorism plus.' "

From the reporting on this I wanted to highlight the especially intriguing part: "The Pentagon war game did not formally endorse either course; rather, it tried to gauge how Taliban fighters, the Afghan and Pakistani governments and NATO allies might react to either of the scenarios."

How they "might react"? Here's some mcchrystal-ball gazing, entirely free of charge but worth far more than any war-game software, for the Pentagon: Our NATO allies -- characterized notably by British domestic fatigue and German pacifism -- will gradually retreat; the Pakistani government, through its intelligence apparatus, will continue abetting the Taliban; and the Afghan government, such as it is, will persist in its paralyzing corruption and general disintegration.

And the Taliban? Well, they seem to be doing just fine, thank you very much, no matter what we do.

In fact, the Taliban are doing better than ever -- "raising hundreds of millions of dollars from the illicit drug trade, kidnappings, extortion and foreign donations that American officials say they are struggling to cut off."

Those same officials concede the losing nature of that struggle -- "I won’t overstate the progress," one "senior American military officer" meekly put it -- and, indeed, the antiAmerican foreign spigot is wide open, with Taliban-earmarked cash gushing in from "private citizens from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran and some Persian Gulf nations."

So the Taliban are floating in an interest-free, non-repayable surplus, while we sink in debt. By the way, each contingent of merely 1,000 American soldiers costs about $1 billion a year. Multiply that by 90 or 100, then factor it out for several years, and you've paid for health-care reform, or countless new schools and new teachers, or toxic clean-ups and thousands of green jobs, or ... well, hell, write your own wish lists and take your pick.

For so many Americans, Afghanistan is no longer a military question -- especially as we witness the growing evidence of our military's profound ineffectiveness in turning Iraq around. It is, rather, a political question; and I just can't see a path for Obama to satisfactorily answer it with a military response.