Answer: It’s time to face down our fears instead.

The best news yet in the War in Afghanistan: Obama may reject the military hawks’ plans! Details via Juan Cole. Be sure to click the link ‘Read the whole thing’ at the bottom of his post, for the bigger picture.

Before Cole’s post, I’d been writing a bit, as my own thoughts on this war have been evolving. triggered in part by the madman killings at Fort Hood, here’s what I have to add…

A mostly quiet 39 year old had his murder-suicide effort planned. A moment’s snap does not come from a guy who bought the guns and ammo, and successfully attacked a room full of unarmed people before being knocked down by several bullets. That’s a guy seeking martyrdom and he failed at that. And was immediately rejected for sainthood by the members of his faith. Geeze, a wacko can’t get an even break, can he?

But no matter, let’s go kill a bunch of Muslims anywhere. After all, those scary religious freaks have terror cells everywhere and have been killing off Americans in our homeland at the rate of 1/4th of one person a year since 9/11. Counting this guy, that 8 year average has now gone up to almost 2 Americans per year. SOME COUNTRY HAS TO PAY!

Could we be the ones to pay? Consider Paul Krugman’s latest, on a seemingly different phenomenon. I’ll get back to that and how it ties in, in a bit.

But as far as striking back out of anger, been there, done that, as Greg Palast notes.

In my life, I’ve heard all the pitches: the threat of Soviet Communism, psychic warnings of the Great Bear (Russia) and the Sleeping Giant (China), biblical prophecies interpreted to warn us of the latter threat prevailing. Plus Cuba, Vietnam, Iran, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama, Libya, Grenada, North Korea, Iraq, Pakistan. All of them an imminent danger to us if we don’t act now. With ferocity.

The number of times all these countries attacked us on our soil? Combined: zero. The number with nuclear arms capable of reaching our soil? Russia and China. Our nukes can hit any of them. That deterrent surpasses everything except the 131 years that preceded the nuclear age, when no-one was invading either.

Which only emphasized the shock felt when a religious cult with a few thousand members exploited our own technology and security loopholes to kill 3,000 people on 9/11. (To add perspective, if you double that number, that’s approximately how many Americans died from fatal injuries in the workplace that same year. An average of eighteen workers died just yesterday due to workplace injuries.)

We were also shocked because Al Qaeda utilized a rare type of assault - a multiple suicide mission - that couldn’t be countered in typical ways. The direct perpetrators couldn’t be punished because they were dead. Our shock and anger were properly directed at the masterminds and support staff. The intensity of our vengeance was compelled by our fear of what they planned to do next and our lack of knowledge about who this ‘new’ enemy was. We rightly attacked their shield, the Taliban in Afghanistan, but have yet to destroy their biggest swords. Eight. Years. Later.

We ‘think’ they’re in Pakistan. They can see we’re in Afghanistan for the long-haul, because the logistical footprint is huge across that country with projects being built that have completion dates 5 years from now.

The costs in money and lives has escalated past the point of reason, as Congressman Eric Massa noted. Over in Iraq, the exit strategy seems to be delayed by the president who promised they’d be out by next summer.

Even worse, along the way to the stalemate in Iraq and fresh escalation in Afghanistan, we lost our way as international leaders in justice and the humane treatment of prisoners. Nobody can spin that away. We have become as beastly as the beasts who attacked us. We are responsible for the new American gulag, for the tortures, rapes and murders that have occurred. We have looked into the abyss and it now looks into us.

Christopher Ketcham’s interview with ex-CIA spook Bob Baer really brings home what has been happening and is likely to happen. In his background info, Ketcham brings up other CIA whistleblowers, John Stockwell and Chalmers Johnson:

For Stockwell, who would quit the CIA in 1976 to whistleblow before Congress, this “rais[ed] serious questions about the moral responsibility of the United States in the international society of nations.” Secrecy in pursuit of the mercurial thing called “national security,” he wrote, had given license to amorality that issued from the highest rungs of government: “The major function of secrecy in Washington is to keep the U.S. people and U.S. Congress from knowing what the nation’s leaders are doing,” he wrote. “Secrecy is power. Secrecy covers up mistakes. Secrecy covers up corruption.” And in the CIA, he concluded, “a profound, arrogant, moral corruption set in.” Ex-CIA analyst Chalmers Johnson came to a similar conclusion: “Every president since Truman, once he discovered that he had a totally secret, financially unaccountable private army at his personal disposal found its deployment irresistible.”

For years, I’ve railed against the extra secrecy of the Bush administration. Vice President Cheney went so far as to claim his office belonged to no branch of government and therefore was accountable to no one’s scrutiny. History has demonstrated one constant lesson repeatedly, to the point where a mathematical probability could apply. Such as: the amount of government secrecy is directly proportionate to the likelihood that something illegal or grossly immoral is going on. History has taught us that. Military people that I’ve been around all my life have repeatedly told me that most national security secrets are hidden to spare political embarrassments, not to protect sources and knowledge from reaching the enemy. Their estimates gauge 80% to 90% of classified data to fall into that category.

No, Afghanistan is not Vietnam. We never lost a major battle to the North Vietnamese army in Vietnam. But we lost anyway, because after enough mistakes, after too much collateral damage, after too long a time, the people there came to view us as occupiers prolonging a civil war that turned into a war to expel us. Nixon and Kissinger had a secret plan to end that war as they took the White House in 1968. They tried to bomb them back into the stone ages. When that didn’t work, they ran out of plans.

Now with our recent wars, we’ve found ways to reduce the collateral damage, but the civilian body count still rises. Numerous analysts in and out of our military have said that most of the country doesn’t trust us. Neither do the people in next door Pakistan. We are not just the enemy of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. We’re viewed as the enemies of all. They believe we’re too allied to India and Saudi Arabia and their own corrupt federal government to be on their side, just as the Palestinians distrust us because of our strong alliance with Israel that exists even when blood-spilling hawks come to power there.

And reports till today suggested Obama was committed to further escalation for goals he and his military commanders describe with ‘maybes’. Which means they’re experimenting. $100 million per day for a maybe is not a good buy.

In Iraq, the war was fought supposedly to remove a dictator with mass destruction weapons that didn’t exist. And that dictator ceased to exist years ago. There, the plan supposedly is to pull troops out of the population centers before major withdrawals can begin. But in Afghanistan, the plan is to put more troops into the population centers, to try and keep the Taliban at bay.

The Iraqis never attacked our country. Neither did the Taliban. The bad guys we’re supposedly really after aren’t in either country. So… why do we persist against the Taliban?

Obama knows a withdrawal has great political risks. Another Al Qaeda attack on our soil after a withdrawal would be blamed on his decision to get out. That’s exactly what kept Nixon fighting a losing battle in Vietnam for so many years. But he escaped what he feared. Hawks didn’t blame him for losing that war. They blamed hippies and leftists for forcing Nixon’s hand. Even though he had no military strategies left anyway.

Obama, on the other hand, will be blamed by Republicans, only because he’s not a Republican. That’s how the dual standards work. He’ll also be blamed if the escalation fails. And it’s a pretty safe bet that it will. (Go re-read Juan Cole at the beginning of this post if you don’t yet grasp why)

Then take time to read the Bob Baer interview, between page 4 and 7 especially. In addition to the political threat to Obama, there’s a huge possibility of blowback from the fresh enemies these wars are creating. That blowback risks further harm to our nation, not less.

While I’m convinced by history’s lessons that small-scale special forces efforts and better intelligence gathering practices will limit the damage Al Qaeda and other terror groups can do, I’ve been fearing Obama will do the opposite for the rest of this term of office. One potential reason that’s largely been ignored: withdrawal would have soldiers exiting service to expand the labor pool during a national unemployment crisis. That, too, would harm Obama politically.

There are other domestic blowback dangers from staying the course that the military hawks are advising. An overextended military increases the stresses on the troops. Some will crack like the psychiatrist did last week. Internal suspicions may grow and damage our military’s cohesiveness. And then there’s these people, eager to risk fomenting an insurrection to regain political power.

Sure, it’s easy to scoff and dismiss them, those wacky teabaggers. But like Germany in the early 1930s, punished economically and its people loaded with resentments, it only took a charismatic demagogue to lead them into the disastrous Nazi era. Fanaticism like we’re seeing now, loaded with xenophobia and nationalism and reloaded with a growing, hurting underclass of people with time on their hands is definitely a potent mix.

One. Charismatic. Ideologue. Away.

One guy that could put voice to the frustrations of an economically strapped population, channeling that hatred into actions against Muslims. Or Latinos. Or whoever.

Do you solemnly swear that you will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that you will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that you take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that you will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which you are about to enter: So help you God?

In response to their oath of office, our elected public officials answer “I do.”

Barack Obama faces multiple crisises. Had the fight against Al Qaeda been stronger earlier in Afghanistan, instead of our military’s major attention diverted to Iraq, we might now be celebrating the complete end of the Taliban as an effective entity in Afghanistan. Had our economy been managed better by the conservatives running it over the last 8 years, these added domestic pains and internal dangers would not be present. The overall mess is not Obama’s crevasse but it’s his to climb out of with the country on his back. But how?

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There is a path to success available
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Obama’s strongest talent has always been his capacity to communicate effectively. Now he’ll need to reach deep for some of his best. His goal should be to define the Obama Doctrine. It must brim with strength, displaying no weakness.

It will define a human rights policy that does not permit enslavement, that indicates support for nations that free both men and women from physical assault, that puts in place justice systems that resolve property and contractual disputes fairly while providing certain penalties for those citizens who resort to violence, including the wealthy and powerful.

It will call on all nations that are not democratic to create systems of governance that permit its citizens to vote in free and fair elections that are monitored by international observers. It will indicate what the advantages are of democratic societies and it should state that the US will stand ready to provide development aid to nations that are willing to develop such systems.

It will reaffirm a commitment against the use, development and stockpiling of chemical and biological weaponry, asserting that nations that do not conform to those standards will be viewed as threats to their neighbors and will face sanctions and tougher measures from the US and its allies

It will likewise define a goal of ending nuclear proliferation, that will halt its spread first, followed by the reduction of stockpiles in all nations, with the longterm goal of eliminating nuclear weapons globally, including the arsenal of the United States.

Whatever the form the Obama doctrine takes, it will have to be comprehensive and indicate that the proven enemies of civilized nations that have attacked repeatedly will continue to face every tool available to thwart their capacity for future attacks. Of extreme importance, it should clearly redefine terror groups - including Al Qaeda - as religious cults that operate outside of the grand standards set by the long established great religions of the world. He must distinguish between the miniscule number of violent extremists and the huge number of practicing Muslims in the world who are good neighbors, threatening no-one.

An imagined example of this key portion of his speech:

Such cults hold no respect for any human life, do not seek to advance the human struggles against disease and misery, do not seek to develop better methods of agriculture that will feed more, do not seek to develop technologies that improve living standards, do not provide inventions that can better lives, but work instead on fresh methods that destroy lives.

We reject such cults as fringe groups that worship death and hate the living, groups that are enemies to the majority of believers in every major religion and in every country.

Delineating them as marginal, he can then state US support for the established leaders of nations and mainstream religions in suppressing and defeating those death cults. It will let people of faith everywhere understand that there is mutual benefit in being allied against the marginal, via repeated references to those marginals as death cults and criminal gangs.

The Bush approach made the grave error of suggesting all terrorists were united as a force, making them sound all-powerful, which granted them a stature that drew more adherents. The Obama Doctrine would consistently diminish them and marginalize them, pointing out their failures, their cowardice, their weaknesses, their allegiance to gods they’ve distorted under layers of hatred for all human lives.

That would be the ultimate end game for a withdrawal from Afghanistan. Without a clear doctrine, Al Qaeda’s leaders would renew the claim that they drove another superpower out of that country and use that as their new recruiting message. But when the day comes - and I hope it comes soon - that Obama starts the withdrawal, he could return to his doctrine and say we’re leaving because too many innocent civilians were dying, caught in the crossfire between the Taliban and soldiers that drove out the the one Taliban group that was sheltering the criminal masterminds of 9-11 and other mass murders around the globe.

In short, we withdraw to protect them, not because our own losses are too great. And he can state that our low fatality rate demonstrates the weakness of any claim that the cult of death might make. He can deride their military weakness because that weakness has become so obvious to the entire globe.

And unlike the Soviets who withdrew and left anarchy in its wake, continued rebuilding and humanitarian aid would be directed to their nation. Because we’re Americans and our finest moments include both the strengths of our swords and our hearts.

It’s time we take a measured response to the tragic consequences of a lone lunatic like the Ft Hood psychiatrist. It’s time we fight Al Qaeda pro-actively instead of reacting in ways that create fresh resentments and new problems down the road.

That the White House is now signaling Obama’s strong enough to demand achievable results from any troop escalation is a very heartening sign, even if he ultimately agrees to some short term middle ground.

The greatest threat he now faces and is sworn to protect the nation from is an internal revolt like the one that threatened FDR and our elected government. His first focus has to be alleviating joblessness now and to usurp the plans and progress of any emerging demagogues (as FDR did with Father Coughlin and Huey Long) till the corner is turned toward re-employment.

As he nears victory on a flawed but longterm economic balm with a healthcare reform bill, this signal about the war in Afghanistan is a sign of fresh hope on the horizon. So let the accolades pour to tell him “we’re with you” because the pressure to fall back to the status quo position is going tom be incredibly strong. And we must be stronger.