Obama sends 30,000 soliders – but it’s not an invasion

US president Barack Obama has ordered 30,000 more US troops to Afghanistan – but warned America would begin to withdraw its military forces by 2011.

Is it just a case of one hand slappeth, the other hand (belatedly) doing the decent thing?

President Obama, lest we forget, says he is not a militarist.

“I do not make this decision lightly,” he said. “I opposed the war in Iraq precisely because I believe that we must exercise restraint in the use of military force, and always consider the long-term consequences of our actions.”

According to the president, this latest push is a reluctant one: “If I did not think that the security of the United States and the safety of the American people were at stake in Afghanistan, I would gladly order every single one of our troops home tomorrow.”

Obama’s claim that the border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan is the “epicentre” of al-Quaida activity is quite straightforward. If the US believes this to be true and also believes that al-Quaida is America’s enemy then it has two options: escalate the war in order to wipe them out or forge a settlement strategy, however that might be done.

Clearly Obama has discounted the latter option, but despite the coming escalation, he doesn’t appear to be terribly keen on the former either.

The deployment of a further 30,000 troops follows Obama’s stated objection for the US military to leave Afghanistan by 2011. In addition, in March 2009 Obama bluntly and honestly answered the question of whether America was winning in Afghanistan. He simply said: “No.” The administration has already made it clear that it thinks the war is unwinnable ‘in military terms’.

Obama’s incoherent more-war/less-war stance isn’t just straightforward political duplicity as many of his domestic supporters-turned-critics claim. In fact, it shows a US administration that, like those of Bush and Clinton before it, can talk tough but has no faith in its mission.

When then president Bill Clinton attacked the rump of Yugoslavia in 1999 he was so worried about American casualties that he sent in no ground troops at all. His successor George W. Bush, often portrayed as a gung-ho Texan gunslinger, had no such qualms when it came to his pet invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Nevertheless, even Bush was rather far removed from the likes of presidents Johnson and Nixon who sent countless numbers of young Americans to their deaths in southeast Asia. The Viet Nam war was supposedly fought in order to curb the ‘evil’ of communism. Bush, on the other hand, was forced to come up with incredible reasons for his conquests, some as bizarre as alleged the promotion of women’s rights.

From the perspective of the Western elites, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars are humanitarian missions in the mould set by Bill Clinton in Yugoslavia. The incoherence of Obama’s policy springs from the fact that in order to justify the use of force, America has recast its army as a kind of Amnesty International with bombs.

It is true that the Obama administration inherited its wars rather than started them. But it is up to them to decide whether to escalate these wars or end them – Obama seems to think he can do both at the same time.