Retribution or healthcare? Obama needs to be clear

During the campaign of President Obama, I was leery about his fierce intension to pursuit Osama bin Ladin in Afghanistan to the point that he would engage in a war against the Taliban. Yet, I felt, like most people, that it was a righteous objective, since it was aimed at atonement for the 3,000 people ruthlessly killed by Al Queda operatives at the New York World Trade Center bombing in 2001.However, as the Obama administration has pursued the war in Afghanistan, it is becoming more clear that there is some confusion about the mission because it appears that he has to go through the Taliban to get to Al Queda. The logic of this policy of pursuing a war against the Taliban is that the administration is willing to shut down the military operation in Iraq, only to open it up again in Afghanistan.

And the mission now appears to be to wipe out the Al Queda base in Afghanistan so that it cannot pursue operations against the U. S. or any other targets globally. This would be fine, except that there is widespread recognition that much of the base of Al Queda is also in Pakistan.

The major problem is that although the Taliban has relations with Al Queda, no one has yet defeated the Taliban, neither the Russians nor the British, and it is unlikely that a full fledged war between them and the United States will change that history. They have the advantage of familiarity with conducting military operations on their own terrain and we have the disadvantage: fighting a guerilla insurgency - more sophisticated than that in Iraq - from a distance.

The war against Osama bin Laden has morphed into a war against the Taliban, and a wider relationship of nation building with Afghanistan in order to support their own effort to control the political forces in their country that may be hostile to U. S. interests. But the question is how long will that strategy take and how much will it cost in money and lives and, most important, will it lead to the primary objective of capturing or killing bin Laden?

So, the question I have is whether there is a mission in Afghanistan more narrow in the sense that it is possible to pursuit bin Ladin with the assistance of the sympathetic Afghanistan government, now that it looks like Hamid Karzai has been re-elected. This means that the current policy must be reassessed and changed, especially in a context where there are major domestic initiatives that the administration has begun, the financing of which will severely strain its ability to pursue a war against the Taliban and do nation-building in Afghanistan effectively.

The opportunity is that public opinion polls are now showing that the American people have grown weary of the war in Afghanistan, not because of doubts about the just principle of retribution, but because they have historic domestic challenges that places this war in a decidedly lower priority. For the first time, the war in Afghanistan registers in the 20s depending on what poll you choose, suggesting that - and often indicating explicitly that - they want the U.S. to pull the plug on this war.

So what if Obama took them up on it? It would give him a golden opportunity he is likely not to get in the future: to close down two wars, save trillions of dollars that could be invested more urgent priorities like jobs, housing, education and health care - projects he has proposed that may cost Americans an estimated $9 trillion in the next ten years. The risk is that when the financial crisis is over, he could be blamed for having shut down the wider policy with Afghanistan, but he should continue, all the while, to vigorously hunt for bin Laden so as not to be vulnerable to the claim that he did not seek retribution for his attack on the U.S.

Obama has a lot on his plate now and it would be smart, even if it has some negative ripple effect, to take one big potentially disastrous problem off the table.

Dr. Ron Walters is Professor Emeritus of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland College Park. His latest book is: The Price of Racial Reconciliation (University of Michigan Press).