AUSTIN, Texas — Nine weeks of basic training, 12 weeks of Officer Candidate School, three weeks of parachute training and another four weeks of Ranger training. After that, 2nd Lt. Teodoro C. Garcia should be ready for his first assignment as an infantry officer. His clock starts in January.
While my son is running, dodging, jumping and low-crawling his way toward a commission, the president, the Congress and the joint chiefs will be trying to decide what do next in Afghanistan.
Teo, 23, has wanted to wear a military uniform since he was 10. You ought to hear his speech about his debt to the nation and his sense of obligation to defend it. He is proud to be third-generation Army and is just the kind of young person the military needs: confident, eager, willing, strong, dedicated and smart.
Given the family investment, the debate over future prosecution of the war is no academic exercise for us. The size of the investment denies me the certitude that some of my colleagues and readers have about the war. Escalating the war poses problems. Staying put poses problems. Pulling out poses problems. The last thing you want to do when someone is shooting at you is to stand still. Jumping into the line of fire isn't very wise, either.
President Barack Obama is balking at a request from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, for more troops. McChrystal commands 100,000 Western troops, two-thirds of them American.
Send more troops, McChrystal urged, or the war is lost. But the war is losing at home with the public and Congress.
Not only are the U.S. public and Congress getting antsy, so are U.S. allies with troops in Afghanistan. Italians, Spaniards and the British are looking for the exit signs.
So sending more troops is a political problem. McChrystal and other top officers say prosecuting the war with the existing level of troops is a military problem, and advising Afghan President Hamid Karzai that he is on his own is a diplomatic problem.
Without U.S. muscle to shore him up, Karzai's troubled government would struggle — to put it gently — for relevancy, and there is no shortage of religious fundamentalists and warlords (who also peddle heroin) to fill the void.
That would leave world leaders to negotiate with dope dealers and religious fanatics. That also would be a return to a world order that existed before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York, Washington and in the air over Pennsylvania — when the Taliban and al Qaeda used sparsely populated areas of Afghanistan for training and staging areas.
Failure in Afghanistan, some say, would invite Islamic fundamentalists to seize even more power in Pakistan, a country with nuclear weapons. Some say Pakistani security on those nukes is good enough that they could be neutered easily if there is an adverse regime change.Interesting notion, but let's hope we don't have to put it to the test.
Obama wants to win Afghan hearts and minds with civilian expertise in agriculture, education and infrastructure. And while that sounds good, those civilians — if he can round up enough of them — will require military support and security.
McChrystal says he needs more troops to pursue the Taliban, but if he gets a bunch of civilians instead, he's going to have to detail existing forces to pull security while the civilians try to do what they do. That puts a stress on troops the general has already declared as insufficient to do the job.
And while the Obama administration may balk at sending more troops, those on the ground now will leave Afghanistan — one way or another — and will have to be replaced.
We haven't talked much about it, but I suspect my son expects to end up there at the head of an infantry platoon.
I wish I could tell both you and him what victory looks like, but I can't because the picture is confusing. If you say "defeat terrorists," then tell me how you know when we've done that. You'll have to pry the Quran out of their cold, dead fingers — and we can't kill them all.
Fighting insurgents is tricky because they are motivated by a rabid devotion to their cause.
Meanwhile, in the United States, we're not sure what the cause is. Let's hope we figure it out before we send over more fresh-faced second lieutenants.
Arnold Garcia Jr. is editorial page editor of the Austin American-Statesman. E-mail: agarcia(at)statesman.com.