CQ Today: As Obama Sells His Afghan Plan, It Helps to Have a Friend Like Ike
By John M. Donnelly
As President Obama seeks to sell his escalation of the Afghanistan War to a skeptical Congress, House Armed Services Chairman Ike Skelton will almost surely emerge as a pivotal figure.
Because of the 77-year-old Missouri Democrat’s position in the center of the debate, Obama will count on him to be a leader of centrists whose votes are critical to securing funding for the expanded war effort.
To Skelton’s left in the House are scores of members, mostly Democrats, who do not believe the war is worth the cost any longer and who might not vote to provide more money for it. To Skelton’s right are scores of other members, almost all Republicans, who will probably vote to fund an escalation in Afghanistan but who have decried Obama’s July 2011 target date to begin withdrawing U.S. troops.
A student of military history, Skelton criticized the George W. Bush administration for diverting too many resources from Afghanistan — which he called “the forgotten war” — to Iraq. And as Obama reappraised his strategy in Afghanistan in recent months, Skelton sent him a letter Sept. 22 to underscore the threat posed by al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan and to urge the president to provide Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal with “the resources and the time he needs” to accomplish his mission.
Skelton gave Obama a boost Dec. 4 when, in remarks at a forum hosted by the American Security Project, a defense think tank, he backed the president’s target for commencing a withdrawal. Skelton said that date is only the start of the withdrawal, and that its pace would be driven by the degree of stability in Afghanistan. “To me it looks like this is a case where there isn’t much to complain about,” he said.
But a lack of complaints doesn’t mean Skelton doesn’t have questions. When McChrystal, the commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan, testifies before the Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, one question will be uppermost in Skelton’s mind: What would success in Afghanistan look like?
“His definition and assessment of a successful mission — that will possibly be the main question he will have put to him,” Skelton said. “When you fight an insurgency, there’s no one to raise the white flag, and there’s no one to sign a peace treaty aboard a battleship. They just fade away. Hopefully that will be the case here, sooner rather than later.”
Source: CQ Today Print Edition
