Big decisions are risky decisions. President Obama took the right risks at West Point on Tuesday when he outlined his plans for a troop surge in Afghanistan.
The obvious gamble is that any military venture in Afghanistan can turn out well. There's a long history of foreign interventions coming to grief in that remote, mountainous, tribal country.
But the earlier interventions – such as the ill-fated Soviet occupation of the 1980s – were attempts to turn the country into a colony or dominion. The United States and its NATO allies aren't trying to own Afghanistan, which means the intervention can be much more limited in its goals and duration – which in turn enhances the chances of success.
The gambles Obama chose not to take were to either abandon the country or try to get by – as the Bush administration did – with an inadequate force on the ground. The end result in both cases would be a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Taliban, whose leaders are implacably hostile to the United States, liberal democracy, Western civilization – anything but the inhuman, primitive theocracy they are trying to resurrect from the Dark Ages.
Wishful thinkers have talked about negotiating a no-terrorism deal with the Taliban. But ideologically, there's not a crack of daylight between the Taliban and al-Qaida. That's why the Taliban gave Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants safe havens and the run of the country in the 1990s, allowing them to stage increasingly devastating terror attacks on Americans that culminated in the horrors of 9/11.
To maintain an offensive, an international terror network needs at least one sympathetic government to provide sanctuary and training bases. The Al-Qaida terrorists were denied that when the United States toppled the Taliban in 2001. Life would be infinitely easier for them if they weren’t being forced to hide in caves and huts, dodging Predators, in remote parts of Pakistan.
To read the complete editorial, visit The (Tacoma) News Tribune.