Obama looks like a wimp over the McChrystal issue

I suppose we should not begrudge Barack Obama his Nobel Peace Prize, though it's a radical break in tradition, since he's only had slightly less than nine months to discharge his imperial duties, most concretely through the agency of high explosives in the Hindu Kush whereas Henry Kissinger had been diligently killing people across the world for years when he won it in 1973.

The announcement cited the US President's "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples", though what it is exactly he has done to increase harmony between the Afghans and the rest of the world, perhaps the five-man Nobel committee will explain in due course.

It's dawning on people predisposed to like the guy that, when it comes to burning issues, the first black president of the United States truly hates to come down on one side or the other. He hates to make powerful people mad. He won't stand up for his own people when they're being savaged by the nutball right, edges them out, then has his press secretary claim that they jumped of their own accord. This may impress the peaceniks of Oslo, but from the American perspective he's looking like a wimp.

Obama's Afghan policy evolved on the campaign trail last year as a one-liner designed to deflect charges that he was a peacenik on Iraq. Not so, he cried. The Global War on Terror was being fought in the wrong place. His pledge was to hunt down and 'kill' Osama bin Laden.

Once ensconced in the Oval Office, Obama, invoking 'bipartisanship', instantly nailed a white flag to the mast by keeping on Robert Gates, Bush's secretary of defence.

He formed a foreign policy team mostly composed of Clinton-era neo-liberal hawks, headed by Mrs Hilary Clinton and Richard Holbrook. His next step was to eject the US commander in Afghanistan, Gen David McKiernan, and install Gen Stanley McChrystal, best known for running an assassination program in Iraq, officially termed 'decapitation'. Then he ordered 17,000 new US troops to be deployed to Afghanistan.

It was a fine exhibition of Obama's eerie skill in foreclosing his own options and allowing opponents to coalesce and seize the initiative. If, on his second day in office, he'd announced a full and complete review of US aims in Afghanistan, with no option left off the table, he'd have had some purchase on the situation.

But the months drifted by and finally the worsening situation forced a review of Afghan policy, precisely when Obama's poll numbers were dropping, the war lobby felt heartened and the liberals were already dejected by the president's surrender to Goldman Sachs and Wall Street.

At this point, fate handed Obama a golden opportunity. With astounding insolence General McChrystal began to conduct a public lobbying campaign for his appeal for 40,000 more troops. His 'top security' rationale for new troops ended up in the hands of Bob Woodward of the Washington Post.

Harry Truman was an indifferent president who needlessly dropped A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, designed to intimidate Stalin. Truman launched the Cold War arms race in 1948. Yet Americans venerate him for two things: the sign on his desk saying 'The buck stops here', and his dramatic firing in April 1951 of war hero General Douglas McArthur for insubordination in challenging Truman's overall direction of the war in Korea.

Truman didn't allow McArthur time to stage a grandiose resignation. He fired him on late-night radio, announcing that: "With deep regret I have concluded that General of the Army Douglas MacArthur is unable to give his wholehearted support to the policies of the US Government and of the UN in matters pertaining to his official duties. In view of the specific responsibilities imposed upon me by the Constitution of the US... I have decided that I must make a change in command in the Far East. I have, therefore, relieved General MacArthur of his command."

It's clear that McChrystal stepped over the line conclusively in his speech in London at the Institute for Strategic Studies General where he contemptuously dismissed the "small footprint" counter-terrorism strategy proposed by Vice President Joe Biden and Senator John Kerry, saying that it would lead to Afghanistan becoming Chaos-istan.

Obama's National Security Advisor, General Jim Jones, declared that it would have been better that McChrystal's criticisms had come up through the Army's chain of command. That was the moment Obama could have fired McChrystal for McArthur's offence - insubordination and civilian control of military policy.

McChrystal is no war hero, like McArthur. People crave some evidence that Obama has fire in his belly. Firing McChrystal might have been high risk, but it could have been a huge coup for Obama at a fraught political moment.

Instead Obama did nothing, except further infuriate his liberal base by saying withdrawal isn't an option. Pundits solemnly explained that given Democrats' distaste for the war in Afghanistan - backed by strong popular hostility - Obama might have to go to Republicans to get the votes for the necessary appropriations of money.

It's all much too late for any sensible policy review.

There have been two moments in the last 40 years when life might have improved for ordinary Afghans, particularly women. The first came with the the reforming left regimes of the late 1970s, destroyed by the warlords with US backing. The second arrived with the US eviction of the Taliban in 2001-02.

But already the US had too many chits out to the warlords of the Northern Alliance. The US 'nation building' apparatus is irreversibly corrupt, with a network of $250,000-a-year consultancies, insider contracts, and beyond that a de facto stake in the drug industry now supplying most of the West's heroin and opium.

There's no possible light at the end of any tunnel. The robot war conducted via Predator missiles infuriates the rural population, where wedding parties are blown to bits every weekend. With more troops and mercenaries now in Afghanistan than during the Russian military presence at its peak, there's zero chance for America to play a long-term constructive role in Afghanistan. The US presence is just a recruiting poster for the Taliban.

But Obama has now surrounded himself with just the same breed of intellectuals who persuaded Lyndon Johnson to destroy his presidency by escalating the war in Vietnam. Last week he invited Republicans as well as Democrats to the White House for a further review of the options.

Obama has let events overtake him, exactly as he allowed the health policy debate to spin out of his control in the summer and early fall. He'll shoot for some sort of compromise, and anger his liberal supporters. A year from now he'll be paying the penalty in the mid-term elections.