The good war, what Obama called the war of necessity a short time ago, becomes the only so-so war, or even the not very good at all war, certainly not the absolutely necessary war.
I’m not sure where I stand on our involvement in Afghanistan. How could I be? I don’t know anything. All I know is that Generals McChrystal and Petreaus and Admiral Mullen are all advising more troops and a counter-insurgency strategy similar to the surge in Iraq. Advising the President to get the Hell out and just poke at it with drones and special forces, we have Joe Biden and John Kerry, who, along with Barack Obama, were as wrong as wrong can be about the surge in Iraq. If I were President, and didn’t have a clue myself, which I don’t and neither does Barack Obama, I know whose advice I would be more likely to listen to.
It’s not that there are no good reasons to quit Afghanistan, some of them are even eloquently expressed by conservatives like George Will. Karzai’s government is corrupt. Nobody has ever succeeded in pacifying Afghanistan. The real problem is Pakistan. Etc. I can see that. If the mission is simply impossible, which it may be (what do I know?), then of course we shouldn’t try to do it. General Petreaus and General McChrystal think it is possible, and they were right about Iraq. John Kerry and Joe Biden think it is impossible, and they were wrong about Iraq. That’s all I’m saying.
It is beginning to look like a done deal in any case. The announcement is being postponed in order to allow time to prepare the public, but the direction is becoming more and more clear. Obama intends to leave Afghanistan to the Iranian-supplied Taliban, and their brothers in Al Qaeda. They can have the country and they can shoot women in the head for dress code violations, in soccer stadiums (attendance required), blow up girls’ schools and Buddha statues to their heart’s content. And we will content ourselves with surgical strikes on Al Qaeda training bases.
This might be the right thing to do. I’m a little surprised that it is the liberal preference, but hey, times change. The cold war is over and there is a Democrat in the White House and those Al Qaeda guys just got lucky that one time.
When George W. Bush took the advice of David Petreaus and approved the surge in Iraq, he went against the opinions of the U.S. Congress, many of his own advisors, the mainstream media, public opinion polls, Barack Obama, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden, to name a few. He had to fire his Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in order to do it. It was, to coin a phrase, a profile in courage. It was like firing McClellan and putting Grant in charge.
I have yet to see any evidence that our current President, regardless of the rightness or wrongness of a particular policy, has that kind of courage. I would love to be proven wrong.