He is getting an intense on-the-job training course. Obama came to this job with little experience. But certainly Americans looking for some relief from the growing deficits caused by the economic bailout, the president’s expensive initiatives and the high human and financial costs of war aren’t going to get it for some time. Marines will carry the battle to them under Obama’s strategy. That scenario probably won’t take place, given the fanatical nature of the Muslim group and the fact that U.S. troops would be leaving in 2011, just might decide to lie low until that takes place. The Taliban, having been given some political assurance that U.S. The president’s position is an enormously difficult place to be, especially with campaigning heating up for next November’s congressional midterm elections during a summer that is likely to see heavy fighting and increasing casualties. That is particularly true in Afghanistan, which has been extremely unkind to invaders and where the rugged mountains are as difficult to penetrate as the religious fundamentalism that has made political stability nearly impossible. With that he has assumed responsibility for any failures, of which there will be some if, once again, history has any relevance. What the president has done, of course, is to have made the war his own. Democrats oppose it about two to one and about the same number of Republicans are for it.
Recent national polls show declining support for the war effort. It seems clear the president will have to rely on congressional Republicans to obtain the funds and support needed. Liberal Democrats particularly regard Obama’s decision as reneging on his campaign pledges to end the fighting quickly. Approving the surge while also setting the time frame for exiting requires not only a fine touch but an amazing amount of luck - success in military operations against the Taliban, the complete cooperation of the government of Hamid Karzai, and an increasingly nervous Congress where many leading members of Obama’s party view any strategy other than withdrawal as a political setback. The effort to assuage both those who see strong and quick action in Afghanistan as necessary to national security and those who no longer support the war after eight years will test the president’s political skills mightily. While the shift of emphasis to Afghanistan will lessen the burden of Iraq where the president contends most combat forces will be gone relatively soon, the huge amounts estimated to first deal with the Taliban and train Afghan forces to take over by a target date of 2011 could be and probably will be woefully off the mark if history is any indication. It would be foolish to put much faith in the estimates of both new domestic initiatives and the cost of two wars. The war tax originally was proposed at five percent but the president was pressured by his advisers to double it.
Ultimately LBJ was forced to ask Congress to approve a tax surcharge to pay for Vietnam. Paying for the war in Vietnam and the Great Society at the same time put enormous strain on the treasury. Johnson’s approach to accounting included using the once sacrosanct Social Security Trust funds as part of the general fund budget. Nothing comes to mind as much as President Lyndon Johnson’s guns and butter budgets that historians have blamed for setting the stage for fiscal insolvency. But partnered with the enormous cost of the proposed health care plan alone - reportedly between $850 billion plus and $1.2 trillion over the next decade, depending on whose bill is adopted - the enormity of the numbers is overwhelming. Under normal circumstances that might not seem a lot. Where do we get the money for all this? The price tag for the surge of 30,000 troops and the troops already there is conservatively estimated at more than $100 billion and that is just the initial outlay.
President Barack Obama’s decision to escalate, temporarily at least, the war in Afghanistan is not only a political gamble it is an economic one as well coming as it does in the face of the huge fiscal demands of his domestic policy.
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