Can Barack Obama Save Afganistan?

by Vanni Cappelli, January 29, 2009

The sudden destruction of the World Trade Center and devastating attack on the Pentagon that claimed thousands of lives on September 11, 2001, traumatically revealed to a complacent America the existence of a radical Islamist terrorist threat based in South-Central Asia, potent enough to breach the country’s historic “ocean walls” of defense. A challenge like no other—the idea that violent attacks could seemingly drop at will from the skies—hung suspended over US foreign policy debates like the sword of Damocles. Amidst national fear and mourning tempered by world sympathy and support, eradication of this threat was held to be as sacred an obligation and existential imperative as defeating fascism was after the attacks on Pearl Harbor. America would “pay any price, bear any burden,” President Bush declared, in the struggle to bring the perpetrator, Osama bin Laden, to justice. This included denying sanctuary to future terrorists by overthrowing the Taliban regime that had sheltered him and his Al Qaeda followers in Afghanistan, and materially and ideologically combating Muslim fundamentalism worldwide. “This generation,” one commentator solemnly pronounced, “will be judged by how it responded to 9/11.”

That was a long time ago, in the way things are measured in unsettled and complicated ages. And long before George Bush handed over the burden of national security to President Barack Obama, successive crises ranging from the geopolitical to the financial had far superseded Afghanistan and its region as the onetime “challenge of a generation” in the minds of a deeply insecure American public. Yet more than seven years later, the original challenge of those dark days remains suspended, and many believe that it is still there because the response was suspended as well.

President Obama has made awareness of these crises and the need for confidence in dealing with them the opening theme of his administration. “Only a handful of times in our history has a generation been confronted with challenges so vast,” he declared to the throng that gathered at Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station as he journeyed toward Washington three days before he was inaugurated. Referring to the nation’s ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he characterized the first as “one that needs to be ended responsibly,” and the second as one that needs to be “waged wisely.”

The new president’s choice of words carried with it the implication that the initial “challenge of a generation” had not been met in an effective way. Amidst a critical deterioration of the security situation in Afghanistan centered on but not limited to a powerful resurgence of the Taliban, this seems self-evident. What had happened to a task that for a brief but intensely emotional time seemed to be the number one priority of the United Sates of America?