The Obama Administration has roundly failed in managing their foreign affairs. North Korea and Iran continue to act as rogue states with no sign of change. The situation in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate. Our relations with Pakistan are just coming back from the brink of collapse. We have rolled over like an old weak dog for Russia in relation to the placement of missiles in Poland and, in turn, alienated our strongest ally in Eastern Europe. Granted, the Bush Administration was no prize in foreign affairs, but they were much more capable in carrying the Big Stick that is needed to draw other nations into line.
A good example of the Bush Administration’s abilities and ideas at work was the Iraq War Surge. Bush ordered thousands of troops into Iraq to provide security, hunt the groups threatening the country’s stability, and train the Iraqi constabulary and military to quell the religious unrest and take command of their country’s streets. The surge was the best thing that could have happened to Iraq. The security it provided gave time for our team to highly train several Iraqi police and military units in the practice of counterinsurgency and basic law enforcement. These units have emerged victorious for the most part in relation to controlling the streets and capturing those internal terrorists who would do harm to their own people. These elite units are the only thing that is holding the nation of Iraq together for now. Though our Iraq activities ended under the auspices of the Obama Administration, the surge was devised and executed by the Bush Administration. The surge was a smart move in a war that didn’t really have a lot of smart moves.
Kim Jong Un in North Korea seems to be carrying on in his father’s footsteps. In most circles I don’t think there was any doubt he would continue antagonizing his neighbors. North Korea continues to demand much more than its share of attention. They are developing nuclear weapons. The North Korean government makes no excuses about their nuclear program being for purposes of war. The Obama Administration continues to mollycoddle them. Recently, the Administration approved new shipments of food to North Korea to help them alleviate their food shortages. What did the USA get in return? We got nothing; only the promise of additional talks about their nuke program. That has all gone out the window with the recent advent of their failed missile launch. Our President is timid when it comes to putting his foot down in the international community. He will simply allow North Korea to continue to make nukes and practice their missile ballistics. He might shake his finger at them a bit and make up some tough sounding rhetoric, but in the end nothing will be done and he will end his first term in a similar fashion to Jimmie Carter. Obama is an “internationalist.” Rather than seeing the U.S. in control of its own destiny, he prefers to place our destiny in the hands of the international community, the UN. Then we can be just as powerless as the UN.
With the exception of the recent mass murder by a U.S. Trooper and the incredible fuck up of burning some Qurans in public, the problems in Afghanistan are not due to the actions of our troops over there. They are due to the inactions and inability of the Administration to create a focused plan of action in regard to the country. This, along with our government’s inability to manage our relationship with Pakistan, has created a situation with virtually no upside. We have been in there since 2001 and should be out of there by now. Instead, our president started a surge of his own, shipping battle weary troopers from Iraq to Afghanistan to provide additional security in hopes of developing the same Nation Building success that Bush had in Iraq. No dice. Afghanistan is an entirely different country. Where Iraq had always had its provinces under control of the central government, Afghanistan is a tribal nation that has had a weak central government with virtually no control over provinces outside of the capital of Kabul.
That being the case, Afghanistan is a nightmare for regular troops. We should have maintained the action as a Special Forces action and used local indigenous troops to do all our fighting for the government there. After 11 years of conflict, our troops should not be providing security to the Afghani government. Regrettably, the Afghani military, like the Afghani government, cannot be trusted to provide security or fight corruption.
Our president will not put the screws to Afghani President Karzai and make him clean up his government. There are no Afghani patriots who would fight corruption. There is no legal system there to mete out justice to those who would take advantage of the peasants and make them pay out bribes in order to curry government favor.
The only choice our president has left us is to get out soon and let it collapse. President Karzai will face a similar fate as his predecessor, President Najibhulla who was placed in office by the Soviets. Najibullah was castrated by Taliban soldiers in 1996. After that they drug him behind a truck until he was dead. Since the Taliban were Pushtuns like himself, Najibullah believed they would not harm him. Karzai probably thinks the same thing. History does repeat itself.
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