Ellsberg: Obama, Like Johnson, Plays Military Politics

The former military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers almost 40 years ago told a reporter that President Barack Obama is playing politics with the U.S. military if he moves ahead with sending more troops to Afghanistan.

 WASHINGTON. D.C. — The former military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers almost 40 years ago told a reporter that President Barack Obama is playing politics with the U.S. military if he moves ahead with sending more troops to Afghanistan.

Daniel Ellsberg noted that Obama’s current situation is very similar to that of President Lyndon B. Johnson who escalated the Vietnam War so as not to bring down his own chances of re-election.

Obama will “go against his own instincts as to what’s best fo

r the country and do what’s best for him and his administration and his party in the short run facing elections, which is to avoid a military revolt,” said the whistleblower.

In other words, by not catering to Gen. Stanley McCrystal’s push for 40,000 more U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the Pentagon could cast Obama as an “unmanly, indecisive” leader.

President Johnson faced the same decision with another unwinnable war in 1965, according to Ellsburg.

“Many Americans, many Afghans will die in order to protect the president from that kind of blame,” he said.

Ellsberg told The Real News Network, that Afghanistan for the top brass at the Pentagon after the botched occupation of Iraq is like the French occupation of Algeirs in the sense that the military believed that it could achieve a victory after the French snafu in Vietnam.

And in either case, “no victory lies ahead [for the US] in Afghanistan,” Ellsburg said.

Ellsberg explained that General McChrystal’s counterinsurgency methods to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan will not work because they didn’t work against the Vietcong in Vietnam either.

“The more troops we put in Vietnam, the more Vietcong were recruited,” he said.

Ellsberg worked in counterinsurgency while at the Pengaton. He leaked the sensitive details of the government’s plans for Vie

tnam to The New York Times in 1971.