Unease Grows Over Obama's Afghanistan Plans

President Obama campaigned on a pledge to pour more resources into the war in Afghanistan, but he now faces what appears to be growing opposition to bolstering an effort that is about to enter its eighth year.

Opinion polls show support for the war effort eroding amid a spate of bad news from Afghanistan. July and August marked the two deadliest months yet for U.S. soldiers there, while even the top U.S. commanding general warned that the situation is "serious."

Fifty-seven percent of Americans now say they oppose the war in Afghanistan, according to a CNN/Opinion Research poll, while a separate poll by McClatchy newspapers found that 54 percent think the United States is not winning in Afghanistan. The surveys were conducted over the past weekend.

For Obama, the shifting ground means that he will struggle to rebuild support for the war effort, particularly if the news from the front does not improve.

"Obama is in a particularly difficult position to do this because the big opponents of escalating in Afghanistan are in fact his own core supporters," says Christopher Gelpi, a professor of political science at Duke University. "So he's off message with the Democratic base on Afghanistan, just like he is on many other issues right now."

If he can show real progress, Obama might be able to persuade his supporters to give him more time.

But in the short term, he faces the very awkward situation of having to rely on Republicans in Congress to support potential requests for additional troops and funding for Afghanistan. This could limit his flexibility in reshaping the storyline over why U.S. troops are still embroiled in active combat.

"He has the opportunity to dump some of the blame for the situation we're in now back on the Bush administration," Gelpi says. "That's good with his base, but that becomes tricky if the people he is trying to build a coalition with to pass legislation are the Republicans this time."

In the meantime, the news from Afghanistan has given some new life to U.S. anti-war groups. They are planning a new set of protests for October, but they will have trouble generating the same kind of momentum they had when demonstrating against the Bush administration's war effort in Iraq.

"The movement has entered a moment of abeyance," says Michael Heaney, a professor of organizational studies and political science at the University of Michigan. "We see all sorts of signs that the movement knows its resources are limited and its support is limited."

Leaders of anti-war groups hope the upcoming eighth anniversary of the Afghanistan invasion on Oct. 7, combined with the growing sense that the situation there is deteriorating, will throw new attention on a conflict that has long been overshadowed by Iraq.

"We're getting a more positive response today than we have at any other time since the beginning of the war in Afghanistan in October 2001," says Brian Becker, the national coordinator of the anti-war ANSWER Coalition. "The tempo of interest and support for our position on Afghanistan is correlated directly with the additional deployment of troops there, the additional intensity of the fighting, and the increasing number of U.S. casualties."

Many of the more moderate political groups that joined the anti-war movement as part of their anti-Bush efforts, such as MoveOn.org, have been reluctant to campaign openly against the war in Afghanistan. Some prefer to focus more on issues like health care or the economy, while others hesitate to put added pressure on a president they helped elect.

Becker says that among the community organizers his group works with, those sentiments may be changing.

"They're telling us now there is a big shift among liberal democrats who didn't want to criticize the new administration," he says. "People now see that many of the new policies are close to where Bush was, at least in the second term."

Heaney, who is writing a book on the anti-war movement, says he expects the October demonstrations to be relatively small, limited largely to the more radical peace activists.

"My feeling is they will not be able to garner widespread support for their efforts," says Heaney, who participated in some of the early anti-Iraq war protests. "While moderates may not be happy with the policy, they're still willing to give the Obama administration the benefit of the doubt in the way that it handles it."

Much of the anti-Iraq war campaign fed off the angry opposition to President Bush. "It was so much easier then," says Judith LeBlanc, national organizing coordinator for United for Peace and Justice, a leading anti-war group. "I can't bring myself to say that he's the best organizer the peace movement ever had, but you know what I mean."

The nomination and election victory of Obama — and his subsequent efforts to launch a drawdown of U.S. troops in Iraq — soothed the demands of many moderates who had joined the anti-war protests. Suddenly, it became much harder for groups to stage large-scale demonstrations.

"We would like to have kept up the momentum," LeBlanc says. "We would like to have pulled hundreds of thousands of people into the street, but there's a time and a place for that."

Budgets dried up, and many groups scaled back their operations. Some had to move to smaller offices or reduce the size of their staffs.

"What is hitting our organization hard is the financial strain," says Geoff Millard, who is chairman of the board of directors for Iraq Veterans Against the War. "We have seen as much of an impact from the financial crisis as you see from having Obama in office."

IVAW voted in January to officially add opposition to the Afghanistan war to its mission. It plans to use a new team of paid organizers to work with local chapters on various grass-roots efforts to better illustrate the cost of two long wars.

In general, anti-war organizers say they plan to use a different set of tactics from their Iraq campaigns to win broader support for their Afghanistan efforts.

Instead of focusing on mass protests, United for Peace and Justice will spend more time promoting policy discussions and trying to pressure members of Congress. On the anniversary of the Afghanistan invasion, it will host a number of house parties, vigils and film screenings around the country.

"Under the entire two Bush terms, we were on the defensive," LeBlanc says. "We were organizing to say no. Now, we are organizing to say yes — yes, we can end this war."

The ANSWER Coalition still plans to stage a series of public demonstrations in October, although Becker admits they will be "largely modest in size." Unlike during the Iraq protests, the message will not be about ousting political leaders or parties.

"It's not a frontal assault against Obama on our part," Becker says. "The message is that instead of spending $200 billion to make sure we can have health care or education, we're spending it on a war that has no end in Afghanistan."