Hillary: Man Up on Afghanistan
Maybe the Obama administration realizes now that its words matter, and that talking down Afghanistan makes victory there more difficult. Or maybe Hillary’s just determined to remind everyone once again that she’s no Barack Obama; she’s instead one tough cookie.
Regardless of her rationale, our Secretary of State has done something of an about-face in recent days. She’s channeled her inner hawk and recalled her glory days from the 2008 presidential campaign when she ran to the right of the Great Left Hope. (Remember the 3:00 a.m. phone call?)
Indeed, the Los Angeles Times reports that our Secretary of State is leading a renewed Obama administration effort to emphasize Afghanistan’s “economic potential, its progress in education, and even its anti-corruption efforts.”
'The picture in Afghanistan is much more positive than we often give it credit for,' Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said during a visit this month to Kabul, the capital…
Clinton, during her trip to Kabul, said most of the ministers in Karzai’s government are ‘very impressive.’ She added, ‘The quality of the people in the government is really quite positive.’
She stressed that U.S. officials will monitor the honesty of Karzai’s government, but she praised the president as a ‘patriot’ who had laid out ‘visionary’ ideas for making the government more honest and effective. In his inauguration address this month, Karzai pledged to fire any official connected to drug trafficking and to ‘end the culture of impunity and violation of the law.’
Clinton complimented anti-corruption steps, including a new system for issuing automobile licenses that eliminates government middlemen who had been skimming fees…
Clinton praised the progress of the country’s agriculture sector, the growth of small business and the treatment of women. ‘If you are looking at social indicators, well-being of people, opportunities for women, it's not all a one-sided negative story.’
Richard C. Holbrooke, a Clinton ally who is the Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told reporters last week that the country, which has raised its school population from 1 million to 8 million, has made ‘extraordinary progress’ in education.
An anonymous “U.S. official,” who allegedly “declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue, said administration officials want Americans to have a basis for supporting the war.”
“People who are trying to size up our effort need to know that there are positive things going on there,” in Afghanistan, the official told the Times.
This is true, and it is important. However, there is a much more hard-headed reason (based on realpolitik) to talk up, and not talk down, Afghanistan; and it is that in counterinsurgency warfare, perceptions are everything. Indeed, perceptions shape the narrative storylines, which are integral to success or failure on the battlefield.
By communicating to the American and Afghan people, and to the world, that progress can be achieved in Afghanistan and, in fact, is being achieved there, Secretary of State Clinton is helping to facilitate a wartime victory. Let us hope that the President follows in her footsteps when, this evening, he addresses the nation and the world; for America cannot afford to lose in Afghanistan.
And should the president scramble to the right, then the Right should give him a pocket of protection to guard against the rush of the hard Left. We should do this because it is the right thing to do, and because the national interest must trump both partisan gain and ideological self-interest.
All of us, after all, are Americans; and the terrorists who would destroy us grant no special clemency to either the liberals or conservatives among us. We are all, in their eyes, equally deserving of death; and so we must defeat them -- now.