Obama's Miscalculation

by John M. Curtis
(310) 204-8700

Copyright Jan. 2, 2010
All Rights Reserved.                    

              Announcing Dec. 2, 2009 he was sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, President Barack Obama deliberated for months, eventually cowing to prevailing military wisdom, including his own campaign promise to re-deploy troops from Iraq.  While bashing Iraq helped get him elected, his good-war/bad-war rhetoric painted him into a corner:  On the one hand, committing himself to exiting Iraq, while, on the other, shifting forces to Afghanistan.  His Dec. 2 national TV address at West Point, N.Y. sounded like Bush-lite, referring “W’s” incessant warnings about another terrorist attack on the U.S. soil.  Obama’s pivot preempted his Republican critics but failed to adjust to shifting sands in the war on terror.  Shifting U.S. military power to Afghanistan was an hour-late-and-a-dollar-short from the days when Osama bin Laden and the Taliban’s Mullah Mohammed Omar escaped from Tora Bora.

            Jumping on dirt bikes, the wily Bin Laden fulfilled his daughter’s promise that the U.S. military would “never get her father.”  Catching up to real-time, Obama didn’t anticipate Yemen-based al-Qaida Nigerian-born terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s failed Dec. 25 attempt to blow up a Northwest airliner en route from Amsterdam to Detroit.  Whatever one thinks of Afghanistan or the fraudulent government of Hamid Karzai, there’s no evidence that al-Qaida plans, coordinates and executives terrorist operations from Afghanistan.  All indications point toward Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and other remote locations from which to orchestrate terrorist activities.  Few people still believe that al-Qaida’s command-and-control hails from Afghanistan.  While toppling the Taliban was well-deserved following Sept. 11, no one blamed the Taliban for plotting or carrying out Sept. 11.

            Since the botched Christmas terrorist incident, the Pentagon has redirected itself to Yemen, where an al-Qaida cell Oct. 12, 2002 blew a 40-foot hole in the guided-missile frigate Cole, killing 17 U.S. sailors.  Two years earlier August 7, 1998, Osama bin Laden struck U.S. embassies in East Africa, truck-bombing facilities in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya, officially declaring war on the U.S.  Five years earlier, former President Bill Clinton, his FBI Director Louis J. Freeh and CIA Director George J. Tenet, didn’t get the message when Bin Laden detonated a bomb Feb. 25, 1993 at the World Trade Center.  Seven years later, he succeeded in leveling the edifice of American capitalism.   Bin Laden proved then, as he does now, that the lumbering U.S. giant can’t respond quickly enough to counter his next move.  Sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan proves his point.

            U.S. Centcom Commander Gen. David Petraeus, former general in charge of Iraq, traveled to Yemen Jan. 2 to meet with Yemen President Ali Abdullah Saleh, hinting at a shift in U.S. policy.  Obama confirmed in his Jan. 2. weekly radio address that would-be Christmas Day bomber Abdulmutallab admitted to al-Qaida training in the remote mountainous region of Yemen.  He apparently trained with al-Qaida between August and Dec. 7 in the rugged Marif or Jouf provinces, though the exact whereabouts where he received terrorist training was not know.  Yemini Information Minister Hassan al-Louzi said that it was “under investigation.  They are trying to uncover where he went, who he met with,” to give U.S. officials the best coordinates for going after al-Qaida terrorists.  No one knows yet whether Abdulmutalab had visited or e-mailed American-born radical Yemini cleric Anwar al-Awlaqi.

              Awlaqi was the fugitive cleric reportedly exchanging dozens of e-mail’s with 39-year-old Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, perpetrating the Nov 6, 2009 Fort Hood, Texas massacre of 13 U.S. soldiers.  No one yet knows whether Hasan acted alone or was orchestrated by Awlaqi or some other al-Qaida operative.  Flying to Yemen, Petraeus acknowledged that Yemen has become a new front in the war on terror, where al-Qaida terrorists have found safe haven in the impoverished southern-most Arab nation .  “Al-Qaida are always on the lookout for places where they might be able to put down roots,” said Petraeus, acknowledging the obvious change in the U.S. battlefield.  Yemin’s Information Minister al-Louszi welcomed U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s suggestion to convene a Jan. 28 summit, plotting strategy to confront a growing al-Qaida presence in Yemen.

                Deliberating three months on Afghanstan, Obama miscalculated al-Qaida’s shifting desert sands, leaving Afghanistan, like Iraq, bereft of good terrorist targets.  Barack must not make the same mistake as Clinton or Bush letting Bin Laden get out-of-hand before wreaking havoc on U.S. soil.  Unless Obama’s new strategy in Afghanistan is going into Pakistan’s ungoverned lands to once-and-for-all get Bin Laden and what’s left of the Taliban, he should reconfigure the mission.  No U.S. soldier should go the their grave unless Obama can say with certainty that the mission defends U.S. national security.  “The most important problems in Yemen are economic at their root,” said al-Louzi, summing up the terrorist dilemma across the impoverished Arab world.  Before it’s too late, Barack must retool the U.S. mission to address new terrorist threats wherever they crop up.

About the Author

John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news.  He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.

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