Paging Dr. Howard (Dean), Dr. Fein (gold), Dr. Howard: How the left can solve Obama’s Afghan policy problem

In a move that was either just ill-considered — or worse, too carefully calculated — President Barack Obama’s administration waited until he got to the other side of the world to let slip that they were officially punting on their self-imposed exit timetable for Afghanistan. Has any major U.S. foreign policy initiative involved so much careful White House deliberation, debate, and then apparently never ending reconsideration and recalibration? What’s more you would think that with all that rumination and revision sooner or later we would get to a better policy but in this case, the quicksand does its thing and the struggling victim does his.

So now, thanks to statements made by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen in Asia, the United States fully expects to be staying in Afghanistan through 2014. And that means, despite the volatility and confusion that seems to reign supreme on this strange little planet, we actually know a few things with great certainty about the next four years.

For example, we know that terrorist threats to the United States will continue to grow in places like Yemen, the Maghreb, the Horn of Africa, Pakistan, and from within the United States and Europe… and we will continue to be spending billions of dollars and losing too many precious lives every month, working toward what will certainly be a frustrating and unsatisfactory conclusion of at least a decade and a half of U.S. fighting and dying in Afghanistan.

We know that due to huge stresses on our budget we will consider defense cuts, entitlement cuts, a shift in the retirement age, and probably a value-added tax… and we will continue to be spending billions of dollars and too many precious lives every month, working toward what will certainly be a frustrating and unsatisfactory conclusion of what will be at least a decade and a half of U.S. fighting and dying in Afghanistan.

We know that due to those stresses the dollar will likely continue to fall, oil prices rise, petrocrats will be further empowered and their terrorist wards will continue to be funded… and we will continue to be spending billions of dollars and too many precious lives every month, working toward what will certainly be a frustrating and unsatisfactory conclusion of what will be at least a decade and a half of U.S. fighting and dying in Afghanistan.

We know that U.S. forces will be stretched thin as new challenges emerge and the American people will lose their will to take on issues that really demand their attention, from combating the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to combating global warming; and we will continue to be spending billions of dollars and too many precious lives every month, working toward what will certainly be a frustrating and unsatisfactory conclusion of what will be at least a decade and half of U.S. fighting and dying in Afghanistan.

Further, we know that in the end we will cut deals with the Taliban, the Iranians and the Pakistanis (and not just the good ones who support peace, tolerance and a focus on the real needs of their people) to install in Afghanistan what almost certainly will be a corrupt, not truly democratic regime that is, at best, ambivalent toward the United States… after having spent years and years spending billions of dollars and too many precious lives every month, working toward just that frustrating and unsatisfactory conclusion.

Is there a way to stop this? It is less likely to happen through battlefield heroics or diplomatic achievements than it is through American politics. While it still seems very unlikely, perhaps what it will take is the real threat of a primary challenge from the left to President Obama from someone who sees the United States’ waste and missteps in Afghanistan as a dangerous diversion of our resources and attentions. It could be recently defeated Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI). It could be former Vermont Governor Howard Dean. But unless there is such a threat, Obama will almost certainly continue to punt his deadlines — stealthily sometimes, whispering into microphones far from home perhaps — because that’s the path of least resistance with the military, and the one that doesn’t leave him open to Republican attacks that he is too weak.

Unfortunately, of course, it is a miscalculation (unless sometime in the next four years he manages to snag or kill Osama bin Laden which is, of course, the ultimate game-changing brass ring in all this). Because in the next two years it will not be Afghanistan which ends up being the real test of his will — the test Vice President Joe Biden spoke of during the 2008 presidential campaign. No, that will come elsewhere: from Iran, from Yemen, from the Maghreb, from Pakistan, or, perhaps most likely of all at the moment, Lebanon, when it convulses into crisis as a consequence of Hezbollah’s resistance to being prosecuted for the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. There will be a coup or an attack or a war someplace, and it will be the president’s decision about how to respond, how to use U.S. force, that will determine whether he is seen as weak or strong. Afghanistan, in the end, is only likely to reveal whether he was decisive or not, politically motivated or not, realistic or not about what can or cannot be achieved. Right now, he seems waiting for someone else to make his decision for him — either an unwieldy, angry, unpredictable, partially radicalized coalition on the ground in Afghanistan… or another in Iowa or New Hampshire.