Obama’s garden path to more of the same

December 16, 2009 by Andrew McLeod · Leave a Comment

Many who believed the US president would bring about real change in the way American foreign policy is conducted could be forgiven for thinking that they’ve been led down the garden path to a brave new world of, well… more of the same.

Is it a case of new packaging, same old product? In its decision making on Afghanistan and Latin America – the latter a region of strategic importance too often overlooked by the US – the Obama administration has mirrored some of the policy errors of previous US governments, even if the rhetoric is different.

Take Obama’s decision to authorise a “surge” of 30,000 extra troops in Afghanistan next year, in addition to the 17,000 troops he sent there in February. It is tailored after the Bush administration’s surge of 24,000 troops in Iraq, which US conservatives claim helped dramatically reduce violence there (though the hundreds killed or maimed by the December bombings in Baghdad would beg to differ). Both surges are the work of Robert Gates, President George W Bush’s defence secretary, who has stayed on in his post under Obama.

The “shock and awe” bully-boy rhetoric of the Rumsfeld era is gone and that is refreshing. ”It’s not the number of people you kill, it’s the number of people you convince,” General Stanley McChrystal, commander of the NATO International Security Assistance Force, likes to tell US soldiers these days. ”It’s the number of people that don’t get killed. It’s the number of houses that are not destroyed. It’s the number of children that do get to go to school.” However, by his own admission, there is much in Afghanistan that McChrystal doesn’t fully understand.

He told the House Armed services Committee that while NATO troops have been fighting in Afghanistan for eight years, the Afghans have been fighting for 30. But Afghan history did not begin with the Soviet invasion, and even a cursory glance at a British history book – or a Soviet one – would enlighten McChrystal as to the enormity of the task ahead. US troops have already been in Afghanistan and Iraq for longer than US troops were involved in the First and Second World Wars combined, and though it is unfashionable today to make the Vietnam comparison, it is easy to see the growing parallels with the Soviet occupation. And we know how that ended: with the Soviet puppet Najibullah’s tortured and bullet riddled body hanging from a lamppost. Few doubt that Afghan President Karzai’s corrupt government would survive without the foreign protection force, but is that why our troops are there?

Britain likes to argue that British troops are in Afghanistan to help the Afghan people learn how to help themselves. Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, however, sees it differently — a surge, if successful, will have prevented his perfect nightmare: nuclear weapons from Pakistan falling into terrorists’ hands. These are both powerful arguments for staying on, but they are reminiscent of the LBJ administration’s arguments for continuing the war in Vietnam.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch in Honduras… the Obama administration blundered badly in the handling of a crisis sparked by the toppling of President Mel Zelaya, by first backing him, then hanging him out to dry. Small crisis, not many hurt, some might think. But what was at stake here was the fresh, friendly image Obama had been trying to give US policy in Latin America, and it had been widely welcomed throughout the region.

What went wrong? After joining the rest of Latin America and the EU in demanding Zelaya’s reinstatement, the administration reversed its decision and went along with the coup leaders’ drive to proceed with an election – without an elected president in place. Republican Senator Jim DeMint, who supported the coup, had been blocking the appointment of Arturo Valenzuela as assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, and Thomas Shannon as ambassador to Brazil. The latter had been directly involved in trying to resolve the crisis in Tegucigalpa, and the State Department’s about-turn on Zelaya’s re-instatement broke the deadlock and – hey presto – both appointments went through.

What made the shift even murkier in the eyes of many Latin Americans was that Lanny Davis, a lawyer and former aide to Hillary Clinton, had been backing the cause of the coup leaders in Washington all along.

The US about-turn was a slap in the face for Brazil, the emerging regional power which had been sheltering Zelaya in its embassy and had led Latin America in calling for Zelaya’s reinstatement. “As President Lula of Brazil watched the United States botch the straightforward challenge of restoring constitutional order to Honduras, he publicly criticised President Obama for ignoring Latin America,” says Robert White of the Washington-based Center for International Policy. “Here Lula was not implying that Obama had turned his back on individual countries of the region, but that he had reneged on his pledge, made at the Summit of the Americas, to seek an ‘equal partnership’ with Latin America, one in which the United States did not dictate terms.”

Lula and other Latin American democratic leaders understood that “by equal partnership Obama meant a sharing of responsibility and joint action with other American states to safeguard the future of democracy in the hemisphere. Unfortunately, in the case of Honduras, our diplomats apparently did not get Obama’s message,” says White.

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