"The Left Grumbles on Afghanistan, But Obama Will Get His Way"

Wall Street Journal:

There’s a fair amount of grumbling on President Barack Obama’s left about his big military push in Afghanistan, but don’t look for it to get in his way—at least for the next year or so.

The litmus test starts Thursday as the House Appropriations Committee considers a $94.2 billion funding bill to pay for the costs of pulling American troops out of Iraq and adding to those in Afghanistan. Rep. David Obey, the crusty appropriations chairman, has made it abundantly clear that he doesn’t like the troop buildup in Afghanistan, and thinks it’s destined to fail to achieve its goal of stabilizing the country.

But Obey has said, in effect, that he’ll give the president a year to prove him wrong. And Rep. Steny Hoyer, the House Democratic majority leader, said in an interview Thursday that the president will get his money. “You will have a majority of House members voting for it,” Rep. Hoyer said. “I think this president, like most presidents, is going to get some time.”

War funding is one of those rare issues where Obama gets substantial help from Republicans, and that should more than offset any Democratic defectors. Hoyer said that the funding bill has “wide bipartisan support,” though certainly is short of “unanimous support.”

A big fight on Afghan war funding surely is a problem Obama could live without, particularly in a week when Afghan President Hamid Karzai has been visiting him in the White House. That visit already has been marred by reports that strikes by American aircraft searching for Taliban fighters mistakenly killed dozens of Afghan civilians.

The Karzai visit, alongside a parallel visit by Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, has underscored a problem Obama faces that is more immediate than any money concerns: The fact that the U.S. is compelled, in the struggle to contain the Taliban, to lean on two leaders the U.S. considers less than stellar. Obama and his aides have openly questioned whether Karzai is up to the job of creating a strong central government in Afghanistan, and they privately have begun questioning whether Zardari has the political skill to roll back Taliban advances in Pakistan.

But Hoyer indicated that the U.S. expects that it will be dealing with Karzai, at least, for some time to come. “Our speculation” is that Karzai will win upcoming elections in Afghanistan and be the American partner there afterwards, he said.

Barack Obama