Sleepwalking into disaster in Afghanistan

John C. Hulsman says that America’s declining status will ultimately doom its Afghan campaign. Obama must learn from Britain how best to manage the decline of an empire

I have just returned from two weeks talking to my friends in the administration and it is horrifyingly apparent that the Obama White House is sleepwalking toward disaster in Afghanistan. The President, reminded by his domestic advisers of the fate of another domestically ambitious president, LBJ, has hesitated before going all-in to rescue the mission in Kabul. He is right to take his time before risking his presidency on a war whose outcome is clearly uncertain. But by all accounts, pressured by both his generals and the neoconservative opposition, Obama is about to make the fateful decision to go ahead with a significant new deployment. And the problem is, as Bismarck put it, that when you draw the sword you roll the dice. In this case, tragically, President Obama will find that the odds of his dice throw are monumentally stacked against him.

The general in charge on the ground, Stanley McChrystal, has been refreshingly blunt. If 40,000 American troops are not quickly dispatched to Afghanistan, the entire mission is likely to fail. But the compromise Obama seems to be settling on, McChrystal lite — giving the general tens of thousands of new American troops, if not quite the 40,000 he has asked for — is exactly what Johnson did in Vietnam. He threaded the needle, never giving his generals the almost limitless number of troops they demanded, while at the same time stoking the war beyond what sceptics could endure.

Once again, this middle approach will satisfy almost no one. The president is storing up trouble politically, and will probably have to, as in the case of Vietnam, revisit the issue down the road, after the new deployment predictably fails to stop the erosion of the Karzai government.