by Jules Witcover

President Obama has been obliged by the reality of the oil spill disaster to acknowledge Harry Truman's famous dictum that "the buck stops" at his desk in the Oval Office. But reality also requires that he not allow the challenge to overwhelm his presidency.

As the Gulf calamity imperils some of the shoreline's finest beaches, wetlands and its fishing industry, half a world away in Afghanistan the troop surge he ordered last fall is facing a moment of truth.

Even before the full 30,000 additional forces have reached Afghanistan, concerns have been expressed about lack of progress against the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, regarded as key to the success of the surge. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. and NATO commander who first called for the buildup, said last week the major push will not start until September.

The latest round of congressional hearings precipitated by such concerns poses the serious question of whether Obama's deadline to start pulling U.S. forces out by July of next year can be met. Obama in setting it late last year said he would reevaluate the situation in December 2010, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said last week "we are going to have to show by the end of the year that our strategy is on the right track and making some headway."

Complicating the outlook is the continuing unreliability of President Hamid Karzai, whose comments on the uncertainty of military success in Kandahar have underscored the diplomatic challenge, despite the window-dressing of Karzai's recent Washington visit.

Obama's timeline for withdrawal was key to selling the surge to liberal Democrats in Congress, who wanted reassurance that Obama was not simply going forward with the strategy of nation-building pursued by the Bush administration.

The president through Vice President Joe Biden emphasized when the surge was adopted that the prime focus in Afghanistan continued to be thwarting and rooting out the al-Qaida terrorism supported by the Taliban, as manifested in the 9/11 attacks.

Biden, who originally opposed the idea of an additional surge, signed on when it was cast in that light, as an intensified campaign against al-Qaida rather than Afghan nation building. If instead it bogs down into more of the latter -- into which the U.S. effort in Iraq disintegrated -- liberal congressional calls for bringing the troops home are predictable.

What happens on the ground in Kandahar between now and the end of the year, therefore, will be critical to the whole Obama gamble of accepting the surge. If the military equation is more favorable for him by year's end, he will have the grounds to adhere to his plan to start pulling out American forces six months thereafter.

But if it isn't, with the full 30,000 troop surge in place by December, and with the American death toll mounting as it is now, the voices in Congress and in the country already calling for an exit from Afghanistan will surely intensify.

When McChrystal first called for an Afghanistan surge last year, antiwar forces at home hoped Obama would recognize it as going down the same road Bush took in Iraq, and decline. Instead, after long internal deliberations, he chose to go along, but with the built-in fail-safe of a time certain to begin pulling out if the hopeful military expectations were not realized.

Since Obama stipulated July 2011 only as a start to American troop withdrawals, the timeline will have a certain elasticity of some months if he chooses to persevere in Afghanistan under unpromising circumstances. Even so, he will have to expect major pushback from liberals and other antiwar factions at home if the slippage goes on.

While the current emergency of the Gulf oil spill may have passed into history a year from now, the memory of the ordeal and of the incredible continuing price paid by its millions of Gulf Coast victims will linger. And Obama particularly will be reminded that his responsibilities literally rest at the water's edge of his own country as well as in obligations abroad.

 

Available at Amazon.com:

The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy

The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics

Bush on the Home Front: Domestic Policy Triumphs and Setbacks

The Political Fix: Changing the Game of American Democracy, from the Grassroots to the White House

 

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Where the Buck Stops for Obama | Politics

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