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US skeptics fear Afghan mission turning into a quagmire

By Dan De Luce / AFP

WASHINGTON — Skeptics reject President Barack Obama's expected decision to ramp up the Afghanistan war as a misguided bid to fix a muddled mission, arguing it will draw America deeper into a quagmire.

Ahead of Obama's momentous address to the nation on Tuesday, even fellow Democrats in Congress are voicing growing doubts about the conflict while polls show a divided American public.

With 2009 by far the deadliest year for foreign troops in Afghanistan, critics of reinforcing the 68,000-strong US contingent portray the mission as unnecessary and unwinnable, warning it has begun to resemble Vietnam.

A USA TODAY/Gallup poll released Wednesday showed rising pessimism among the US public, with only 35 percent approving of Obama's handling of the conflict, down from 56 percent four months ago.

America was divided on the president's expected decision to dispatch some 34,000 more US troops. Half of those surveyed backed the plans, while 39 percent said it was time to begin withdrawing forces.

With the Al-Qaeda leadership now outside Afghanistan, skeptics have long been saying there is no vital national interest at stake and that maintaining a large military presence there would not prevent another September 11.

"Averting a recurrence of that awful day does not require the semi-permanent occupation and pacification of distant countries like Afghanistan," Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich wrote in August.

US leaders were ignoring the lessons of history, as Soviet and British military missions met with fierce resistance from Afghans, he said.

"Fixing Afghanistan is not only unnecessary, it's also likely to prove impossible. Not for nothing has the place acquired the nickname Graveyard of Empires," he wrote in the journal Commonweal.

A former senior State Department official who resigned his Afghanistan post in September said the United States had become "a supporting actor" in the country's decades-old civil war between Pashtuns and other ethnic groups.

In his resignation letter, Matthew Hoh also dismissed warnings that Washington must rout out the Taliban and allied insurgents in Afghanistan to prevent attacks on the United States.

That "would require us to occupy western Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, etc," wrote Hoh, the first US official known to have resigned in protest over the war.

The US ambassador in Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, has himself expressed deep reservations about a major troop buildup, reportedly sending strongly-worded cables to the White House citing rampant corruption in President Hamid Karzai's government.

Liberal lawmakers in Obama's Democratic Party have called for a timeline to withdraw US forces and floated levying a new income tax to pay for the war or blocking funding for a troop surge, warning the costly mission threatens to derail ambitious plans for domestic reforms.

"We are concerned about committing additional US troops and taxpayer dollars in Afghanistan, especially when the US mission is unclear and when methods for measuring mission effectiveness are underdeveloped or nonexistent," five Democrats in Congress wrote to Obama earlier this month.

A group of lawmakers, including House Appropriations Committee Chairman Dave Obey, warned that "regardless of whether one favors the war or not, if it is to be fought, it ought to be paid for."

Although the proposal is a symbolic move without a realistic chance of passage, it underlines the growing dissatisfaction among some of Obama's staunchest allies over the course of the war.

Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who heads the Armed Services Committee, has called for focusing efforts on training Afghan security forces before committing any additional combat troops.

Even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has questioned any US approach that relies on Karzai's corruption-plagued government in Kabul.

"How can we ask the American people to pay a big price in lives and limbs, and also in dollars, if we don't have a connection to a reliable partner?" she asked on National Public Radio.