Afghanistan, Iran, and Obama

I was looking back through my previous articles to see what I haven’t written about yet, and I realized I haven’t written an article dedicated to Afghanistan!  Shock!  Well now’s as good a time as any to start on it, what with the major NATO offensive going on in the Afghan Helmand Province, which apparently is supposed to deliver a serious blow to the Taliban.  The fighting so far has been something of a success, though, as usual, civilians have been unnecessarily dying.  That said, it appears that at least some of them have been killed because the Taliban has been using them as human shields.  Who saw that coming?

Basically, this can be seen as the first major move in what will be the Afghan equivalent of a surge.  Technically, it’s a good idea on Obama’s part.  Bush’s only decent Iraq legacy was the surge, and now Obama’s taking that relatively popular move and transferring it to Afghanistan.

The good news?  They’ve already caught the number 2 leader in the Afghanistan, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who’s second only to Mullah Omar, the infamous one-eyed leader of the Taliban.  It’s a rather large blow for the Taliban, but nothing they can’t recover from.  They’ve shown themselves to be quite a versatile force, but crushing them apparently isn’t the Obama strategy (nor is it that of Hamid Karzai).  The idea is to defeat them militarily and then negotiate with them (a move that Baradar is said to favor), to at least try and bring stability into Afghanistan so that the American military can pull out and Karzai can try and fix the country.

It’s a long shot, frankly, Karzai’s regime is plagued by corruption, and a quick American exit seems unlikely from a practical standpoint, but a necessity from a political standpoint.  The Afghan war is getting more and more unpopular in the U.S. right now, and Afghanistan knows it.  It’s why people are still cooperating with the Taliban.  They don’t really like the Taliban, but the Taliban has made it abundantly clear that if anyone cooperates with the U.S. they will be destroyed as soon as our troops leave, and the Afghans remember enough of America’s abandonment after the Soviet pull-out to believe them.  So what will happen?

Probably, we’ll pull out too soon.  We’ve been doing things wrong for too long to just start doing right now.  And maybe that’s cynical.  But let’s look at a place we might have better luck:

IRAN

Okay, so I realize things aren’t necessarily going well with Iran right now, but America is finally seeing a more sympathetic world.  Lately, both China and Russia have been chastising Iran for it’s vacillating on nuclear policy, which is pretty clearly a ploy to distract the eyes of the world from the regimes own domestic issues.

The problem here is the possibility of a nuclear Iran and an arms strike.  Most nuclear experts agree that while Iran has the know-how to produce a nuclear bomb, they are a long way away from actually being able to enrich uranium to the point of being weapons-grade.  And before they get there, honestly, I think we can count on an Israeli airstrike.  Which would be bad.

But America is starting to regain some of its long lost credibility in the region simply because the US has chastised Israel over the settlement issues and over heavy-handedness in last year’s Gaza war.  They have reached out to Iran, but Iran hasn’t done anything about it, so they look better there, and the fact that they have at least tried diplomacy makes us look reasonable and makes Ahmadinejad look like a douche.  And the thing to realize is that Ahmadinejad doesn’t have the widespread support that a lot of Americans seem to think he has in the Middle East.

Keep in mind that Iran is Shi’ite, whereas more of the Middle East is Sunni.  The Jordanians are mostly Sunni, as are the Syrians.  The Lebanese are more of a mixed bag, with a Shi’a and Sunni tie in terms of demographic, and the entire Arabian Peninsula is majority Sunni.  These two groups don’t get along very well, and since Shi’ites are in the minority, and since Iran represents the Shi’ites (and funds a lot of their rebel/terrorist groups), Iran isn’t seen as the greatest influence in the region.

Which isn’t to say their preferred to the Americans.  But while the Americans are gaining ground, the Iranians are losing it, and I guess that’s the only good news we have in the Middle East.  While Obama’s policy is certainly an improvement on Bush’s, I don’t think we’ll be able to say whether the policy is a success until 2012 runs around.  To put it lightly:  things are meh right now, and they could go horribly, horribly wrong.