What if "No Exit" ?

15:00, December 17, 2009


By Li Hongmei People's Daily Online

Richard N. Haass, President of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, published a signed article with the title "No Exit" in Monday's Newsweek, in which he made much reflection on the prolonged Afghanistan War, as the once optimistic expectations seem to have been dashed. He also cast doubts on Obama's exit strategies for fear that the incremental surge of American troops would possibly be stranded in the quagmire of the already eight-year-old battle. To illustrate this, Haass cited Sartre's play No Exit, as saying that "exit strategies are simpler to design than to execute." And he ended his article saying "Like the room in Sartre's play, conflicts are easier to get into than out of."

The big question is, perhaps, what if the U.S. is unable to make a successful retreat or exit as described by Haass? Or so to speak, whether the U.S. would otherwise follow the track of the overturned cart as seen in the Vietnam War? Yes, sometimes history does recur. The young Obama administration finally decided to send additional 30,000-strong forces to the battle front, and almost simultaneously President Obama delivered his Nobel peace prize acceptance speech in Oslo, explaining the needs for more strengthened U.S. deployment in Afghanistan by sending more soldiers there ----"Some will kill and some be killed", as he said.

Back to the Vietnam War, the then newly elected president Lyndon Johnson used to do just the same in escalating the war----an increase from 16,000 American soldiers in 1963 to 550,000 in early 1968, of whom over 1000 were killed every month. Despite his outstanding performance while in office and a landslide in his 1964 election, his reelection collapsed in 1968, as a result of his foiled dream to build a smart and great American society.

It was the Vietnam War that nipped his political blueprint in the bud. The then Saigon government he and his predecessors had all along supported proved incompetent and corrupt. Consequently, instead of uprooting the Vietnamese "armed riots" and returning power to Saigon as America had expected, the so-called Vietnam Communist "insurgents" just snowballed both in number and in morale, leaving a further weakening Saigon and a disgruntled and destitute Vietnamese population.

The shadow of the Vietnam War even now still hovers over the minds of many Americans; especially to the veterans alive, the hurt lingers on. The young president Barack Obama is trying to reopen the wound by following in the footsteps of his predecessor, escalating and heightening the ongoing fight. No wonder, many observers stated Afghanistan was no more the good war, if, in the beginning, it looked like a good war.

It had been presumed that the U.S. would quickly drive the Taliban and Al Qaeda out of the Afghanistan soil, and install a friendly, and more important, pro-American Kabul government, but only to find that what unfolds is replicating the model in Iraq, and further back, in Vietnam.

The Kabul government currently in power, whom the U.S. has tried to support as a partner in the fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, has long been beleaguered with a rocky political landscape and corruption. The war-torn Afghanistan population will not side with the slumbering Karzai government nor will they welcome the U.S. presence. On the other hand, the bigger footprint made by the enhanced U.S. troops and its NATO allies only helped fuel the insurgency and trigger more fierce resistance, turning out today's dire situation. With the U.S. and NATO troops fanning out into every region of the country, The Taliban, instead of beating a hasty retreat, melted into the locals or sneaked to the neighboring Pakistan, pouncing on any possibility to reestablish itself. Taliban dies hard.

By the long-delayed withdrawal strategy, the U.S. would recede step by step and then help place Hamid Karzau in charge to pacify his nation, hoping he would do without much U.S. interference.

The predicament facing the U.S. and the one-year-old Obama administration is that, at the time, there seems no policy that can reverse the undoing in Afghanistan, even with more troops and better-planned tactics. But the young president will try whatever he can to steer clear of the pitfall that would turn the superpower into an occupying power, which runs counter to his campaign pledge to bring the combating Americans soon back home and his honor as the Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

To stave off a bitter end, the U.S. needs to decisively defeat the Taliban insurgents. However, the Obama administration spent months desperately trying to find a solution to that effect. But seemingly they could do nothing but send more ground troops and continue to prop up an unpopular Kabul government.

At least at first, the U.S. didn't look like an occupier and, hence, easily marched into Afghanistan. But it now finds itself in the dilemma of "No Exit". What if Afghanistan is really a room with "No Exit" ? Where is the breakthrough to the deadlock war ?