The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Afghanistan Won’t Be Easy Like Iraq
The New York Times delivers a couple of surprises in a “news analysis” on President Obama’s plan for a surge in Afghanistan:
Obama strongly opposed President George W. Bush’s surge in Iraq during his presidential campaign, and even now he has never publicly acknowledged that it was largely successful.
But in the White House Situation Room a little more than a month ago, he told his aides, “It turned out to be a good thing.” And as many of Mr. Obama’s own advisers have recounted in recent days in interviews, the decision on the surge of 30,000 troops to Afghanistan by next summer was at least partly inspired by the success of the effort in Iraq, which Mr. Bush’s aides say is their best hope that historians will give them some credit when the history of a highly problematic war is written.
Obama has been whining for months about the “mess” he “inherited” from Bush. If he would publicly acknowledge that his predecessor got something right, it would be a welcome sign of graciousness and maturity. No, we are not holding our breath.
And the Times is changing its own tune on Iraq. The gist of the analysis is that because the two countries are so very different, we should not expect success in Afghanistan simply because things went well in Iraq. That’s a 180 in itself–and then consider this example of the differences:
The Iraq surge worked in large part because there was powerful support in Anbar Province from the so-called Awakening, the movement by local Sunni tribes who rose up against extremists who were killing people, forcibly marrying local women and cutting off the hands of men who smoked in public. In Iraq, American officials believed that most leaders of a vigorous opposition, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, were foreigners.
The United States remains hopeful that it can capitalize on Afghan militias that have taken up arms against the Taliban in local areas, but a series of intelligence reports supplied to Mr. Obama since September found no evidence in Afghanistan of anything on the scale of the Iraqi Awakening movement. What’s more, in Afghanistan the extremists, the Taliban, are natives.
For years the Times’s stock description of “al Qaeda in Mesopotamia” (i.e., Iraq) emphasized that it was, in the reckoning of the paper’s style gurus, an indigenous movement (albeit with alleged foreign leadership as an afterthought). Turns out it’s Afghanistan that has an indigenous insurgency! Well, at least until the politics shift again.
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