People as experienced as journalist George Wilson, and as old as me, remember Sen. George Aiken's, R-Vt., solution for the Vietnam quagmire: "Declare victory and leave."
 
The president then, Richard Nixon, was as much a foreign policy pragmatist as he was neurotic about the legacy of leaving Indochina with America looking like a "pitiful helpless giant." As a result, leaving Vietnam took years and thousands of American lives.
 
President Obama is looking more and more the pragmatist as he attempts to deal with the worsening situation in Afghanistan. Unlike Nixon, he has not just his domestic political opponents to worry about if he wants to leave Afghanistan quickly (which may be the case); Obama now also has a brace of politicized generals lobbying him in public, and in private, to take their advice or "lose" the war in Afghanistan.
 
Obama has before him a modification of the disastrous Nixon route out of his quagmire: the "Biden Option." This entails: 

  • bombing the terrorists with high tech wizardry;
 
  • train the Afghan army, and 
 
  • leave so slowly that - hopefully - no one will notice.
 
But, the high tech wizardry can't really find the terrorists and can't separate out the innocent civilians when it does, thereby infuriating all Afghans, except the Taliban. The Afghan Army will be viable when its soldiers believe the government has a cause worth dying for - a point in time nowhere on the horizon, and rather than fading away, at least one of our hyper-political generals is now rumored to be seriously contemplating a run for the presidency, despite his - private - denials.

If Obama does indeed wish to end the misadventure in Afghanistan, the Nixon-Biden option could end up even worse for Obama and America than did Vietnamization.
 
George Aiken, speak to us!
 
In a column in the Sept. 29 CongressDaily, veteran national security journalist George Wilson wrote a very thought provoking article about all these issues.