Some Dems fret over Afghanistan commitment

Tom Curry National affairs writer • Profile • E-mail

WASHINGTON - Sen. Barack Obama “has not set a timeline for withdrawal from Afghanistan,” said his foreign policy advisor Susan Rice this week.

On Saturday the Democratic presidential candidate landed in Kabul on his first visit to that country, one of the stops in his week-long overseas tour.

Obama has set a 16-month exit timetable for Iraq, although he'd consider leaving an unspecified number of troops there as a “residual force.”

But this week, the focus of the presidential debate shifted to Afghanistan. Both Obama and his Republican foe, Sen. John McCain, called for more troops to be dispatched to join the 36,000 U.S. personnel already there.

In all likelihood, the Democrats will have comfortable majorities in the new Congress next January, and could possibly have Obama as president to work with.

If so, the responsibility would be entirely on the Democrats to decide the Afghanistan strategy and how to pay for military operations there.

Given the war weariness among the American people, are Democratic leaders convinced that they have enough popular support for a long term, nation-building commitment to Afghanistan?

Video McCain: 'I know how to win wars' July 15: John McCain says, “I know how to win wars. And if I’m elected President, I will turn around the war in Afghanistan, just as we have turned around the war in Iraq." MSNBC

Since taking over the House in 2007, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has deftly managed to see that funding to Iraq and Afghanistan continues, despite her own opposition to the war in Iraq.

Anti-war Democrats have misgivings
At this point, only a few House Democrats are voicing misgivings about a prolonged stay in Afghanistan.

On Thursday Pelosi signaled a sense of wariness about the duration of the Afghanistan engagement.

“The commitment to Afghanistan is a real one,” Pelosi said at her weekly press briefing, but then she added a cautionary note. “The Afghan people are not receptive to long-term, long-time visitors to their country. They are very independent, self-reliant people. So I would hope that whatever approach we take there to fight terrorism… will be something that would be finite.”

There is an “Out of Iraq Caucus” among House Democrats, but there’s no “Out of Afghanistan Caucus.”

When Rep. Bill Delahunt, D-Mass., a founder of the Out of Iraq Caucus, was asked this week whether there would be a similarly themed Afghanistan caucus a year from today, he said, “That’s a damned good question.”

The Out of Iraq Caucus will be meeting next week to air its concerns over U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and about the apparent unanimity of Obama and McCain in continuing that participation over the next four years.

Slide show   Images of Afghanistan View pictures from a war-torn country. more photos

“If we are going to do something constructive about Afghanistan, we should have done it seven years ago,” said anti-war Democrat Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif.

“We’ve made a lot of mistakes and I am going to be watching very carefully before I am at all supportive of sending our troops over there to get killed.”

“What is their mission?” she asked of the U.S. troops Obama or McCain would send to Afghanistan. “What is the exit strategy?”

Chance of success in Afghanistan?
Woolsey said she is not at all convinced that the United States could be any more successful in establishing stability in Afghanistan than it has been in Iraq.

She added that if Afghanistan “was the right war, it would have been the right war five or six years ago. My fear is we go from Afghanistan to Pakistan because that’s where al-Qaida has run. So is that the next ‘right war’? I say no.”

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