Dems Uneasy On Security

From David M. Herszenhorn at the New York Times:
Congressional Democrats are voicing growing unease over the Obama administration’s national security policies, including the seemingly open-ended commitment in Afghanistan and the nettlesome question of what to do with prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
House leaders have yanked from an emergency military spending bill the $80 million that President Obama requested to close the detention center, saying he had not provided a plan for the more than 200 detainees there. The White House has said the center will close by Jan. 22, 2010.
It is virtually certain that the Democratic majorities, with solid Republican support, will approve $96.7 billion in spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and for other military operations.
But with votes in the House on Thursday and in the Senate next week, the discomfort among Democrats points to a harder road ahead for Mr. Obama and the prospect of far more serious rancor if conditions worsen overseas.
The unease, particularly over the war in Afghanistan, is greatest right now in the more liberal ranks of the Democratic caucus and is more evident in the House than in the Senate.
But American troop levels and war costs in Afghanistan will soar in the coming year, and party leaders, including Representative David R. Obey of Wisconsin, the House Appropriations Committee chairman, have warned that Democrats will most likely give the administration just one more year to get a handle on the military situation there before they start losing patience.
Mr. Obey said he would give the White House a year to demonstrate progress, just as he gave the Nixon administration a year to show progress in the Vietnam War inherited from the Johnson administration.
“With respect to Afghanistan and Pakistan, I am extremely dubious that the administration will be able to accomplish what it wants to accomplish,” Mr. Obey said last week. “The problem is not the administration’s policy or its goals. The problem is that I doubt that we have the tools there that we need to implement virtually any policy in that region.”
Mr. Obey, who entered Congress in 1969, added: “At the end of the year, Nixon had not moved the policy, and so I began to oppose the war. I am following that same approach here.”
The House spending bill requires that the Obama administration deliver a report early next year on progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan, though it does not set any benchmarks for American military performance.
On Guantánamo, Senate Democratic leaders now say they plan to include the money to close the prison in their version of the supplemental military spending measure, but with tight restrictions that for now would ban the transfer of prisoners to the United States. Before using the money, the administration would also have to submit a plan to Congress detailing how it would close the camp.
Republicans are not oblivious to the Democrats’ internal disagreements. In the Senate, the Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, is making speeches nearly every day about the dangers of shuttering the Guantánamo camp. Some liberal Democrats are expressing outright opposition to continuing the operations in Iraq or Afghanistan, and are planning to vote against the spending bill.