Afghanistan: The Tunnel at the End of the Light

WikiLeaks, the semi-respectable sibling of Wikipedia, has demonstrated that journalism is not a dead on arrival joke on the Web. The gauntlet for the war in Afghanistan has been thrown down.

In what every news organization, reputable and disreputable, is calling a flood not a leak, the ugly truth about America and the West’s engagement in Afghanistan has been laid bare.

“We don’t know how to react,” one frustrated Obama Administration official said on Monday. “This obviously puts Congress and the public in a bad mood.”

Understatement never had a more musical ring. You can hear the bell tolling for the Obama Administration’s contradictory, full-in/full-out, ‘why can’t we have it both ways?’ strategy in Afghanistan.

There is no more important and revealing issue delineating the disappointment of clear-thinking people in America and beyond than Obama’s senseless continuation of the Bush/Cheney policies in Afghanistan.

Rather than break with the past, as most of the country wanted or at least were willing to do in Afghanistan after the nightmare of Bush/Cheney, Obama’s ‘new’ strategy has meant far more troops, far more drones, and far deeper quagmire.

It is not unfair to ask: Does the Obama presidency signify not the political, but the metaphysical continuation of Bush/Cheney?

Except when Barack is amping it up for a big speech, he comes off flat, intellectual, disengaged. A repeated dose of this ennui over the first year of his presidency has, more than any thing else, caused the American people, who have an awful case of ennui themselves, to lose faith in him.

Barack unwittingly reflects Americans to themselves, just as he cleverly symbolized their dream of painless change during the campaign, with his false call for “Transformation” and “Change.” Obama is not giving the nation or the world the change that people hoped for; rather, he has inspired a growing fear of it in the United States.

At this point President Obama faces a choice. He can continue down this path, gambling that the dearth of choices in the Republican Party will keep him in office in 2012. But the fast-approaching November 2010 elections will be a referendum on Obama. And the signs are pointing toward the bottom falling out for him and the Democratic Party.

The other option is that Obama can actually embrace the call for change, take some political risk, and begin to lead the nation. He may lose, but at least he’ll lose trying to do something other than play the game in Washington.

The question then is: Does America want change?

There isn’t a person in a million, inside or outside America, who really wants transformation. Even most progressives, when it comes down to it, don’t want to examine their worldviews, which is what transformation requires.

Obama rode into office on a shallow wave of hope for change. Once in office, Barack showed that he’s a wonk. He's following in the footsteps of the failed presidency of Bill and Hillary Clinton.

What Obama and followers fail to realize is that Clinton/Gore paved the way for Bush/Cheney in the same way that Obama/Biden, without true change, are paving the way for something even worse.

Latter-day America disproves the wishful thinking that countries and human civilization are marching, two-steps-ahead-one-step back, toward a better future.

Nothing impedes radical change in individuals, peoples, and humankind more than the shared belief by both conservatives and progressives that things are getting better.

Of course, many people hold that view at the intellectual level while giving up on humanity at the emotional level. The net effect in America is the extraordinary lack of outrage following the flood of documents in WikiLeaks, which give an undeniable picture of the sleepless nightmare of the Afghan war.

Obama changed the rhetoric from the Bush/Cheney years, but not the policies themselves. Now the ‘facts on the ground’ in Afghanistan and Pakistan are compelling the Administration to make authentic changes.

That means redefining the entire endeavor, with the focus on preventing terrorist attacks (Biden was right), rather than defeating a growing insurgency. Obama has to plug the hole in blood and treasure in Afghanistan as urgently as he had to plug the hole in the Gulf of Mexico.

Until he does that, his Administration, and America itself, will continue to bleed out onto the sands of Afghanistan.

Can Barack transform himself from a campaign invention into an emotionally responsive president?

That would require that he confront the lack of passion in himself, which so accurately and ironically mirrors the lack of passion in the American people. Instead he demonstrates what he really thinks of the American people by appearing on the fluffy daytime talk show, “The View.”

Can Barack’s false call for change become a genuine one? Counter intuitively, that’s the only way the Democrats will be able to halt and reverse the rightwing Republican tide.

Such transformation would be the sign of genuine leadership from Barack Obama.

- Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.

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