Lyndon Baines Obama

I rise from my sick bed to pass along two things and say one thing.

First, there's this from The Associated Press:

Signaling he's decided on new troop levels for the Afghanistan war, President Barack Obama said Tuesday he intends to "finish the job" on his watch and destroy terrorist networks in the region.

The president said he would reveal his decision on how many additional soldiers to deploy to Afghanistan after Thanksgiving. The White House is aiming for an announcement by Obama either Tuesday or Wednesday in a national address. Congressional hearings will quickly follow.

Military officials and others have been expecting Obama to settle on a middle-ground option that would deploy an eventual 32,000 to 35,000 U.S. forces to the 8-year-old conflict. That rough figure has stood as the most likely option since before Obama's war council meeting earlier this month when he tasked military planners with rearranging the timing and makeup of some of the deployments. That led to Monday night's final gathering.

With the war worsening on Obama's watch, U.S. combat deaths climbing and public support dropping, the president seemed aware he has a lot to explain to the public.

"I feel very confident that when the American people hear a clear rationale for what we're doing there and how we intend to achieve our goals, that they will be supportive," he said, speaking at a White House news conference with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

"It is my intention to finish the job," he said of the war in Afghanistan that has been going on since shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001.

Obama held his 10th and final war council meeting Monday night. In response to a question about his upcoming announcement, he sketched out the areas - but not the specifics - of what he will talk about after Thanksgiving.

THEN, there's this -- the latest edition of Bill Moyers Journal. Here's Moyers' introduction:

Our country wonders this weekend what is on President Obama's mind. He is apparently, about to bring months of deliberation to a close and answer General Stanley McChrystal's request for more troops in Afghanistan. When he finally announces how many, why, and at what cost, he will most likely have defined his presidency, for the consequences will be far-reaching and unpredictable. As I read and listen and wait with all of you for answers, I have been thinking about the mind of another president, Lyndon B. Johnson.

I was 30 years old, a White House Assistant, working on politics and domestic policy. I watched and listened as LBJ made his fateful decisions about Vietnam. He had been thrust into office by the murder of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963-- 46 years ago this weekend. And within hours of taking the oath of office was told that the situation in South Vietnam was far worse than he knew.

Less than four weeks before Kennedy's death, the South Vietnamese president had himself been assassinated in a coup by his generals, a coup the Kennedy Administration had encouraged.

South Vietnam was in chaos, and even as President Johnson tried to calm our own grieving country, in those first weeks in office, he received one briefing after another about the deteriorating situation in Southeast Asia.

Lyndon Johnson secretly recorded many of the phone calls and conversations he had in the White House. In this broadcast, you're going to hear excerpts that reveal how he wrestled over what to do in Vietnam. There are hours of tapes and the audio quality is not the best, but I've chosen a few to give you an insight into the mind of one president facing the choice of whether or not to send more and more American soldiers to fight in a far-away and strange place.

Granted, Barack Obama is not Lyndon Johnson, Afghanistan is not Vietnam and this is now, not then. But listen and you will hear echoes and refrains that resonate today.

NO, OBAMA isn't LBJ, and Afghanistan isn't Vietnam, but I watched Moyers' broadcast -- I highly recommend you watch the whole thing, either above or on the PBS web site -- and those "echoes and refrains" do not only "resonate" today, they are absolutely eerie.

Afghanistan is every bit the mess today that South Vietnam was in 1964, with the added complication that the Afghans have been forever ungovernable.

The French empire, in tatters after World War II, was finished off in Vietnam and Algeria. The Soviet empire died, in large part, in Afghanistan. And if Barack Obama -- who has debunked any hope Americans had in him as a transformative leader -- either cannot or will not learn the lessons of history, the American empire will be finished off in the Middle East, and maybe America with it.

President Johnson led a country with a strong economy and a manageable deficit. All Vietnam cost him was the Great Society . . . and 58,000 American lives sacrificed for absolutely no damn good reason.

President Obama leads a country brought to its economic knees, with no hope of standing tall anytime soon. All Afghanistan might cost him is everything . . . and God only knows how many American lives sacrificed for absolutely no damn good reason.

THERE IS the mission of killing as many al Qaida as possible, which is doable. That was the original reason for going into Afghanistan -- not getting ourselves caught up in the sequel to Brezhnev's Folly.

Capturing and holding the entirety of Afghanistan is not doable. Neither is creating a relatively honest, Western-style democratic government there, nor is turning 12th century peasants into postmodern, pro-Western sophisticates capable of supporting a relatively honest, Western-style democratic government.

Hubris has been the death of many an empire whose time has past. We are a hubristic people.

Meanwhile on the isle. . . .

While English and Welsh "freshers" were out getting pissed last week, Rifleman Craig Wood, 18, was otherwise occupied after a short stint in Afghanistan.

Мы все теперь русские

The headline says "We are all Russians now."

Afghanistan did it to us. That and our failure to learn from history -- once again indulging the fatal American impulse to "nation-build" nations that don't want to be built. Especially by outsiders.

If not for Iraq, perhaps we could have taken care of our al-Qaida business and gotten the hell out -- or at least botched the whole thing much less badly -- before we turned into Russians (as the Russians 20 years ago turned into British, who turned into etcetera and so on).

BUT NO. President Obama has his hands full of George W. Bush's Afghan mess now, and there ain't no good way out. Read this story in The Times of London and note that American soldiers are saying about Afghanistan what GIs said about Vietnam . . . and what Russians said about their "Vietnam."

American soldiers serving in Afghanistan are depressed and deeply disillusioned, according to the chaplains of two US battalions that have spent nine months on the front line in the war against the Taleban.

Many feel that they are risking their lives — and that colleagues have died — for a futile mission and an Afghan population that does nothing to help them, the chaplains told The Times in their makeshift chapel on this fortress-like base in a dusty, brown valley southwest of Kabul.

“The many soldiers who come to see us have a sense of futility and anger about being here. They are really in a state of depression and despair and just want to get back to their families,” said Captain Jeff Masengale, of the 10th Mountain Division’s 2-87 Infantry Battalion.

“They feel they are risking their lives for progress that’s hard to discern,” said Captain Sam Rico, of the Division’s 4-25 Field Artillery Battalion. “They are tired, strained, confused and just want to get through.” The chaplains said that they were speaking out because the men could not.

The base is not, it has to be said, obviously downcast, and many troops do not share the chaplains’ assessment. The soldiers are, by nature and training, upbeat, driven by a strong sense of duty, and they do their jobs as best they can. Re-enlistment rates are surprisingly good for the 2-87, though poor for the 4-25. Several men approached by The Times, however, readily admitted that their morale had slumped.

“We’re lost — that’s how I feel. I’m not exactly sure why we’re here,” said Specialist Raquime Mercer, 20, whose closest friend was shot dead by a renegade Afghan policeman last Friday. “I need a clear-cut purpose if I’m going to get hurt out here or if I’m going to die.”

Sergeant Christopher Hughes, 37, from Detroit, has lost six colleagues and survived two roadside bombs. Asked if the mission was worthwhile, he replied: “If I knew exactly what the mission was, probably so, but I don’t.”

The only soldiers who thought it was going well “work in an office, not on the ground”. In his opinion “the whole country is going to s***”.

(snip)

The soldiers are angry that colleagues are losing their lives while trying to help a population that will not help them. “You give them all the humanitarian assistance that they want and they’re still going to lie to you. They’ll tell you there’s no Taleban anywhere in the area and as soon as you roll away, ten feet from their house, you get shot at again,” said Specialist Eric Petty, from Georgia.

Captain Rico told of the disgust of a medic who was asked to treat an insurgent shortly after pulling a colleague’s charred corpse from a bombed vehicle.

The soldiers complain that rules of engagement designed to minimise civilian casualties mean that they fight with one arm tied behind their backs. “They’re a joke,” said one. “You get shot at but can do nothing about it. You have to see the person with the weapon. It’s not enough to know which house the shooting’s coming from.”

The soldiers joke that their Isaf arm badges stand not for International Security Assistance Force but “I Suck At Fighting” or “I Support Afghan Farmers”.

To compound matters, soldiers are mainly being killed not in combat but on routine journeys, by roadside bombs planted by an invisible enemy. “That’s very demoralising,” said Captain Masengale.

The constant deployments are, meanwhile, playing havoc with the soldiers’ private lives. “They’re killing families,” he said. “Divorces are skyrocketing. PTSD is off the scale. There have been hundreds of injuries that send soldiers home and affect families for the rest of their lives.”

The chaplains said that many soldiers had lost their desire to help Afghanistan. “All they want to do is make it home alive and go back to their wives and children and visit the families who have lost husbands and fathers over here. It comes down to just surviving,” said Captain Masengale.

HERE'S WHAT the Russians were saying in 1989:

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IN FACT, the American commander in Afghanistan already is borrowing heavily from the Russian playbook. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's new strategy of pulling back to "protect" Afghan population centers is pure, uncut Red Army 1980-something.

Watch and find yourself getting queasy:

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LET US PRAY Barack Obama is worthy of his Nobel Peace Prize. He's going to need all the mad Nobel skillz he can muster just to keep all our heads above water.