End In Sight?

What a difference a couple of years makes.  It wasn’t too long ago that America’s military operation in Iraq was the foreign policy debate du jour.  But with the advent of the Obama Administration’s push for rapid withdrawal and the improving security situation there, little is heard from a place that helped shape the worldview of this generation of Americans.  Considering the defining events that made “Jessica Lynch”, “shock and awe”, “Fallujah”, “Abu Ghraib”, and “mission accomplished” forever a part of the zeitgeist, I’d imagine that no news is good news at this point.  But as that front comes to a close, it seems as if all eyes are on Afghanistan, and rightly so.

Two weeks ago, we hit a benchmark that very few people would have imagined almost nine years ago; the war in Afghanistan is now America’s longest, surpassing Vietnam.  Though many are quick to make the comparison between the conflicts (a Newsweek cover story even asked if Afghanistan was “Obama’s Vietnam”), the similarities only go so far.  And though President Obama has indeed taken ownership over the conflict (he did nearly triple the amount of American forces operating there after all), the White House this weekend reaffirmed his intent to end it, sticking to a self-imposed timetable that was announced at the same time he announced the second wave of troop increases last year.

White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel has tried to clarify President Barack Obama’s July 2011 deadline for beginning to withdrawal U.S. troops from Afghanistan, a benchmark that continues to stir contradictions and confusion.

In an interview aired Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” Emanuel tried to parse Vice President Joe Biden’s insistence that “a whole lot of” troops will pull out in July 2011 with Gen. David Patraeus stressing it’s “very important that it not imply a race for the exits.”

“Everybody knows there’s a firm date, and that firm date is a date – deals with the troops that are part of the surge, the additional 30,000. What will be determined at that date or going into that date will be the scale and scope of that reduction,” Emanuel said, adding that the July 2011 deadline is “not moving.”

“That’s not changing. Everybody agreed on that date. General Petraeus did. Secretary Gates did. As also Admiral Mullen agreed,” he said. And the goal is to take this opportunity, focus on what needs to get done, and then on July 2011, is to begin the reduction of troops.”

Much of the military brass is still balking at the idea of this, but the Obama Administration is pressing forward.  Either way, we are still a year out and anything could happen at this point, especially considering that our measure of success is ambiguous to say the least.  But until then, the war presses on.  I’m sure many of us have forgotten what it was like to live in a country not at war, and that’s certainly never good for our health as a nation.