Bar has been set high for Obama’s address to nation

Bar has been set high for Obama’s address to nation

To the extent that perception is reality, President Barack Obama faces an additional challenge when he gives what will be one of the most important addresses of his young presidency next week.

When it was leaked in August the Obama’s commander in Afghanistan, Army Gen. Stanley McCrystal wanted an additional 40,000 troops on the ground, Obama was expected by some to answer, “Yes, sir.”

That’s in keeping with the fiction promulgated by the previous administration that anything the generals wanted, generals got. If that had been anything more than fiction, the entire history of the Iraq War may have played out differently. Those generals who argued for a much larger invasion force when the United States went into Iraq were ignored and the result of that and other decisions was chaos after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Instead of a quick victory and orderly reinstitution of control, the result was a war against an insurgency that dragged on, costing hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of American lives. Iraq is seldom thought of these days by the American people, except, of course for the tens of thousands of American families whose fathers, mothers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters are serving there.

The attention now is on Afghanistan, where more Americans are dying, the central government is riddled with corruption, the medieval Taliban is gaining strength and the enemy that brought us there in the first place, al-Qaida, is largely absent because its members are hiding in the nearby mountains of Pakistan.

It’s much more complex

That summary is only a very superficial description of a far more complicated situation on the ground, so it should not come as a surprise that Obama wanted to take more than a minute to consider his options.

Unfortunately, many Americans are no longer accustomed to taking time and taking a long view. They are more inclined to agree with the message of the cartoon at right.

While Obama was holding multiple meetings with his national security team, some of his critics — among them, ironically, former Vice President Dick Cheney, who was in a position to affect our war policy in Afghanistan for the better for seven years — accused him of “dithering.”

The word caught on, and it became for many the perception, and thus the reality referenced in our first paragraph.

Call it dithering, or call it deliberation, but whatever it is called, its time is past.

On Tuesday, speaking in West Point, home of the Army’s military academy, Obama will tell the nation and the world what he, as commander in chief, intends to do in Afghanistan.

He has no perfect choices. Afghanistan has a history of resisting outside interference, as both the British and the Soviet painfully learned. What he must do is present realistic goals and practical methods of meeting those goals.

The broad objective is obvious: do what we can to help establish a government that has the support of the Afghanis and is honest, efficient and strong enough to defeat, or at least keep at bay, the radical Taliban. And to bring American troops home.

If the president addresses not only how that’s going to be accomplished, his time will have been well spent. If he also talks about how much it will cost and how we’re going to pay for it, that would be a bonus.