Rep. Howard "Buck" McKeon, a California Republican, is a ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee.
The paramount duty of the president is to keep Americans safe. As President Obama continues his first year in office, surely he understands this awesome responsibility. The question facing Obama—one that will be highlighted in the coming weeks—is whether he will make the right policy choices across an array of thorny national security issues. These choices are always tough and inevitably come with trade-offs. Congress, national politics, and the electorate play a role, but the decision sits squarely in the Oval Office. At the end of the day, it is the president who manages the risks facing this nation. How a president manages risk determines whether the country will be kept safe.
There are four high-risk decisions facing President Obama where the wrong policy choice will threaten our collective security. Afghanistan, Iraq, the detainees in Guantánamo Bay, and investing in capabilities to hedge against future threats will all require presidential leadership.
President Obama criticized the Bush administration for neglecting the real threat in Afghanistan. He argued that the war of necessity—the "legitimate" war—was against al Qaeda and the Taliban. Candidate Obama admonished that "you don't muddle through the central front on terror, and you don't muddle going after bin Laden. You don't muddle through stamping out the Taliban." The question is whether President Obama will heed his own words. Polls suggesting waning support for the war, combined with political pressure to collect a "peace dividend," are driving some inside and outside the administration to seek an early exit from Afghanistan. Instead of adopting the resource- and time-intensive counterinsurgency strategy our commanders recommend, they favor a minimalist approach that relies on an offshore counterterrorism strategy to defeat al Qaeda and leaves it to the emerging Afghan government and its security forces to defeat the Taliban.
Such an approach may seem tantalizing to a president seeking to avoid overseas entanglement in order to keep the focus on his domestic agenda, such as healthcare reform. Unfortunately, the short-term benefit of underresourcing the strategy in Afghanistan or, worse, redeploying our forces prematurely will only lead to a more vulnerable homeland. The last time we pursued a minimally resourced counterterrorism strategy against al Qaeda, Afghanistan remained a terrorist safe haven; the 9/11 attacks were the result. A return to this approach will likely place American lives at risk. Eight years after the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center and after eight years of fighting in Afghanistan, the president must finally give that country the resources needed to decisively defeat al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Adequately resourcing Afghanistan should not come at the expense of sustaining our successes in Iraq. Although candidate Obama promised that he would end the war in Iraq, the war—in effect—was winding down when he assumed office. Gen. David Petraeus's surge and successful application of counterinsurgency doctrine dealt Al Qaeda in Iraq a decisive blow and allowed Iraqis to surmount the ethnic violence that ripped through the country for most of 2006 and 2007. Thus, President Obama's challenge is different than that of his predecessor—winning the peace, thereby ensuring that we do not squander our hard-fought gains.
In an effort to stay true to his campaign promise, President Obama committed to redeploying our combat forces from Iraq by August 2010. This plan assumes that the Iraqi government and its security forces will step up as U.S. forces step back and that national and local Iraqi politics will not trigger sectarian violence. If Iraq has taught us anything, it's that planning assumptions ought not be too optimistic. The August 2010 timeline, therefore, may need to be revisited in the face of increased violence or political upheaval.
Failure to win the peace in Iraq will make our successes in the war irrelevant. A stable Iraq with a strong U.S.-Iraq military-to-military relationship on par with our security relationship with South Korea is the end state we should pursue. "Normalization" of the Iraqi-U.S. relationship must not end it; we must take advantage of the opportunity for the United States to stabilize the Middle East through a strong Iraqi-U.S. bilateral relationship.
While President Obama seems to be continuing many of the "war on terror" policies of the Bush administration, his decision to close the detention facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, is fraught with risk and lacks strategic coherence. An executive order signed just after President Obama took office translates to a policy of moving detainees to the United States. Eight months later, the administration still lacks an implementation plan. The preoccupation with Gitmo's closure has distracted the president from the more pressing national security problem of how we ensure that detainees from Gitmo do not resurface on the battlefield. This should be priority No. 1—not figuring out which U.S. town should play host to the terrorists currently residing in Gitmo.
Finally, President Obama must make investments in future security. He should steer clear of the hollow defense budgets, peace dividends, and procurement holidays that ruled the Clinton era. We don't need a repeat of these shortsighted policies. In defense, as in anything else, you get what you pay for. The temptation to take dollars ordinarily reserved for defense to free up funds for domestic spending will ultimately come at the cost of our security.
The national security challenges before President Obama are clear. Our country's safety will hinge on the choices he will make as commander in chief. Congress and the American people will be watching closely.
Read an opposing view: Why Obama's pragmatic approach will improve national security, from Sen. Evan Bayh, Indiana Democrat and member of the Select Committee on Intelligence and Armed Services Committee.
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