The Risky Business of Afghan Deadline

About a year from now, Washington will witness an epic clash between President Barack Obama and the leaders of the United States military. That’s the big takeaway from Jonathan Alter’s new book, The Promise, about Obama’s first year in office. Ever since last December, when Obama told a crowd at West Point that he was both sending reinforcements to Afghanistan and planning to begin withdrawing them eighteen months later, most commentators have assumed that the surge is real but the timetable is fake. The more money the military spends and the more blood it spills, goes the logic, the more invested it will become in the fight. And since barely anyone believes that America and its allies will have crippled the Taliban by next summer, Generals David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal will presumably block any substantial withdrawal. After all, as David Halberstam details in The Best and the Brightest, civilians tend to delude themselves that military deployments are like faucets they can turn off at will when, in fact, the more troops they send, the more authority they cede to the men with stripes on their shoulders. Stopping a war that the military does not want stopped requires a massive civil-military showdown, the kind that Harry Truman triggered when he fired Douglas MacArthur in 1951 because the general would not stop trying to reunify the Korean Peninsula. Few in the punditocracy believe Barack Obama would do any such thing.