The name of action
Toolbox
Published: October 20, 2009
President Obama is taking his time developing a strategy for Afghanistan, and so critics have begun to liken him to an indecisive Hamlet, too enmeshed in the choices before him to take action.
But consider the lesson of Hamlet. He was the Danish prince of Shakespeare's play who had pledged to revenge the murder of his father, but who found his resolution "sicklied over with the pale cast of thought." It turned out Hamlet had a conscience, and he did not want inadvertently to do the devil's work. When he finally took action, it was rash and ill-considered. He became a killer several times over, and he drove the woman he loved to madness and suicide.
Rash and ill-considered action is something we have had too much of.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal has prepared a report for Obama, stating that the U.S. might need to commit an additional 40,000 troops to Afghanistan to secure the country from the Taliban insurgency. His report created the expectation that an immediate response was necessary, that a decisive commander would say yes or no, in or out. But these are false dichotomies. Immediate action is sometimes rash. We could end up, as Hamlet did, killing the man behind the curtain, widening the circle of bloodshed, solving nothing.
The Obama administration is using the fiasco of Afghanistan's election in August to give pause to the rush to judgment about troop numbers. It was not clear over the weekend that President Hamid Karzai was prepared to accept the ruling of U.N. election observers that massive fraud had undermined the legitimacy of Karzai's alleged victory. A variety of U.S. government spokesmen is saying that until the Afghan government demonstrates its legitimacy there will be no commitment of additional U.S. troops.
A story in The New York Times Magazine on Sunday provided a close-up look at what our troops are already facing there, both the advantages of their presence and the difficulties of their mission. The advantage is that the presence of U.S. and NATO troops ensures a measure of stability of the nation. In areas that the U.S. military has secured, life goes on reasonably well. Taliban insurgents and sympathizers or renegade warlords continue to make trouble in much of the country, but the population centers are not threatened by a Taliban takeover.
At the fringes adjoining the border regions in the south and east, the story is different. Some fringe regions are never likely to come under the control through direct military conquest. They are remote mountain and desert regions that are a true frontier.
Obama is likely using his strategy discussions to determine what kind of force would be useful and where. Would it really be worthwhile to send 20,000 troops into the rugged valleys of Kunar Province, where U.S. outposts have nearly been overrun? Regions such as these, and some of the remote desert reaches of southern Afghanistan, will never be conquerable, but it is possible that the threat from those regions can be contained until it diminishes. For now that will require a continuing presence of U.S. troops and maybe even an expansion of their numbers.
Hamlet lashed out and killed a foolish old man, thinking he was fulfilling his duty. Acting in ignorance leads to that sort of result. The United States acted in ignorance when it invaded Iraq, and the consequences are still with us. The invasion of Afghanistan was a necessary response to the attacks of Sept. 11, but the war since then has been conducted in ignorance of the realities of Afghanistan.
Obama has put in place knowledgeable people to craft a strategy designed to prevent a descent into chaos in Afghanistan while avoiding a destructive overreaction by the United States. It is to avoid Hamlet-like rashness and its deadly consequences that Obama has been willing to be accused of Hamlet-like indecision. There are worse things to be accused of than being careful with the lives of American soldiers and of the people of Afghanistan.
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