Sometimes it’s easy to forget that we are a nation at war.
The conflict in Afghanistan seldom makes the news. Compared to the uprising of ISIS, the conflict in Syria and reactions to President Obama’s deal with Iran involving nuclear weapons, the war in Afghanistan was in the backseat of foreign policy news for a rare moment in its 14-year duration.
That changed, however, when President Obama announced Oct. 15 that U.S. troops would remain in Afghanistan until early 2017 to continue training Afghani troops in their fight against al-Qaida, according to the New York Times.
Whoever is elected president in 2017 will be the one to deal with the conflict in Afghanistan.
That means we will have been at war in the Middle East under the leadership of not one, not two, but three different presidents. Not since the war in Vietnam have we seen so many lives, so much effort and so much time poured into one region of the world.
To make matters worse, the Taliban controls about one fifth of Afghanistan, according to the New York Times. The terrorists our nation has been fighting since Sept. 11, 2001, still have a considerable presence in Afghanistan.
I’m not certain how much longer they’re planning on keeping their stay.
The situation in Afghanistan, coupled with a wide variety of factors, makes me long for the Obama we saw campaigning for president in 2008. During that election cycle, we saw a man with real promise make claims a lot of us wanted to hear.
Those claims included the closing of America’s controversial detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a call for a new era of international cooperation.
After eight years, what is the state of our world and America’s place in it?
Guantanamo Bay is still open in Cuba. While there is no U.S. troop presence in Iraq, ISIS’s attacks do not paint a rosy picture in the country for years to come. The war in Afghanistan continues.
International cooperation looks difficult to achieve when the relationship we have with Russia, the world’s other super power, closely resembles the relationship we had with the country when it was named the Soviet Union.
This isn’t to say that Obama’s foreign policy record has been all bad. He was responsible for the death of Osama bin Laden, the most hated man in the free world, in 2011.
His commitment to ridding our world of nuclear weapons is also admirable. In addition to the deal with Iran, he has made commitments with at least 48 different nations to reduce their stockpiles of nuclear weapons, according to Foreign Policy magazine.
Too often, however, his tenure has been marred by stumbles, controversy and lapses in judgment.
Who will represent America in this murky geopolitical minefield? Who is best equipped to extract our country from the tangled webs not only Obama, but also his predecessor have put us in?
Like an effective diplomat, they must see two sides to everything. They must have confidence, but more importantly, they must know the point where their ambition meets reality.
We are still a nation at war. I can only hope our next leader, whoever they are, can find a way to end our rocky, unstable, almost decade-and-a-half marriage to the Middle East.
ttfitzpa@indiana.edu
@tfitzwrites
