Obama's wartime trifecta

As President Barack Obama peers into the unknown in Libya, he must continue to look over his shoulder at Iraq and Afghanistan as American forces strive to extricate themselves from the military commitments there.

The fighting in Iraq is said to be winding down and being borne mostly by Iraqi forces, and the Obama administration still holds to end of this year as the deadline for withdrawal. But American trainers are still involved there and casualties grind on amidst a shaky political backdrop.

More disturbingly, Obama's 2009 pledge to begin withdrawing his surge of 30,000 more combat troops in Afghanistan this July appears to be under heavier pushback from the Pentagon, where such a timetable never was favored. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S commander there, have long insisted that any pullouts must be tied to conditions on the ground.

Even as Petraeus has spoken of modest progress in the fight against the Taliban insurgents, there is little sign of a successful end in sight. Meanwhile, public opinion polls conclude that as many as two-thirds of Americans now believe the war in Afghanistan was a mistake, or at least a losing cause.

Obama in agreeing to the surge stipulated that he was willing to give it two years to see whether it could work, at which time the drawdown of U.S. forces would have to start. The decision was clearly a gesture to war critics in his party who supported his 2008 election on the basis of his earlier pledge to bring an end to both wars.

But since then a certain mission creep has occurred. While the administration has held to the July date for a start to American combat troop withdrawals, at the last NATO conference members engaged in Afghanistan agreed on the end of 2014 as the timetable for full withdrawal.

The Obama administration now appears to be facing a second round of the torturous debate begun in 2009 on the way forward in Afghanistan. Once again, Vice President Joe Biden can expected to weigh in heavily for more than a mere token pullout in July, to emphasize Obama's determination to get out of that particular quagmire.

In his speech Monday night on Libya, the president pointedly observed that he had no intention of repeating the American experience in Iraq, explicitly limiting the U.S. goal to the protection of Libyan civilians, not ousting Moammar Gadhafi. Noting that "we went down that road in Iraq" and that "regime change there took eight years," Obama said "that is not something we can afford to repeat in Libya."

Yet thereafter it was disclosed he had signed a secret order authorizing arming the Libyan rebels, and that CIA agents had been dispatched to the country to collect intelligence on the rebels. The administration wants to determine whether they warrant further U.S. support and could be counted on to pursue an acceptable alternative government in Tripoli.

More openly taking on regime change in Libya risks making a mockery of Obama's artful dodging that Gadhafi "must leave" but that his administration won't be leading the charge to get rid of him. Whatever the extent of U.S. involvement in Libya, it must be factored against the continued engagement in Afghanistan, particularly at a time of extraordinary pressures at home for severe budgetary slashes.

Looming increasingly over the spreading military challenge are the uncertain political ramifications in the coming presidential election year of a drawn-out U.S. commitment in Libya and the other two wars. Traditionally, Republicans have supported the military in wartime, and the GOP hopefuls so far have been content to question Obama's timing and absence of an exit strategy from the Libyan fight.

But another stalemate bogging down America in Africa could make up for the seeming shallowness of the Republican field of presidential aspirants and revive hopes of making Obama a one-term president. The irony of a Nobel Peace Prize winner still engaged in as many as three wars simultaneously would be a contentious and embarrassing political cross for him to bear.

Columnist Jules Witcover's latest book is Joe Biden: A Life of Trial and Redemption." You can respond to this column at juleswitcover@comcast.net.