Tuesday, March 17, 2009
It was probably inevitable that the American left would turn sharply against the war in Afghanistan the moment it was politically opportune. Still, the speed with which it has done so has been breathtaking.
Time was when the received bipartisan and trans-Atlantic wisdom about Afghanistan was that it was the necessary war, the good war, the no-choice-but-to-fight and can't-afford-to-lose war, and that not least of everything that made the invasion and occupation of Iraq such arrant folly was that it distracted us from "finishing the job" in the place where the attacks of 9/11 were conceived and planned.
This was the wisdom candidate Barack Obama was merely regurgitating when, in an August 2007 speech, he promised that his priority as president would be "getting out of Iraq and on to the right battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan." True to his word, he has now ordered the deployment of 17,000 additional soldiers to that battlefield.
So why are the people who cheered Mr. Obama then (or offered no objection) now running for the exit signs? Why, for example, is New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, the paper's reliably liberal tribune, calling Afghanistan a "quagmire" -- after denouncing the Bush administration in 2006 for "taking its eye off the real enemy in Afghanistan"?
Call it another instance of that old logic, reductio ad Vietnam...
Indeed, but the fact is that the fight went out of the modern left years ago. They don't have the stomach or the heart for it. We're currently in the process of rationalizing our way out of 'George Bush's War on Terror' by redefining enemy combatants into something better suited to sending Keystone InterPol police and Hague judges after. Once that process is matured it's all over but the choppers home. 'I woulda done it better' is for people out of power who criticize those with the responsibility to make the tough decisions. The fact is there are reasons why we took a turn into Iraq -- reasonable reasons -- and just pumping more combat troops into Afghanistan isn't necessarily the most efficacious way to go -- just ask the Soviets.
You raise a good point; "and just pumping more combat troops into Afghanistan isn't necessarily the most efficacious way to go -- just ask the Soviets." And I might add look at the British Empire and Tsarist Russia.
As this series plays out, we seem to have forgotton that, in my recogning, we had one mission in Afghanistan: Get bin Laden. We ended up takng on the Taliban as a government that was aiding and abetting him.
To date, we haven't nailed bin Laden. A major force is not necessary to meet this mission.
In the spirit of "While you up, would you get me another...". Our diplomatic elements and 'nation-builders' just had to play political Florence Nightengales (sic). "While we're there we can really make out. (Ya know, Like man, all those poppies to control, hair salons to build, etc."
So typical. The Afghans have as much capacity, given their own devices, to destroy themselves as any other people.
I wanted to get bin Laden and broom those who were allied with him, Talibanis, out of our sights.
Re, the Left and Afghanistan, two or three facts are prominent,
1) People tend to forget just how much opposition the Left generated, in the immediate wake of 9/11, when it came to the original Afghanistan initiative, c. Nov/Dec, 2001. It was considerable and it increased once that campaign commenced. Most of those memories are lost, I suspect, due to a certain memory-hole convenience as well due to the Iraq campaign.
2) One of the repeated cries from the Left during the Iraq campaign(s) was that they didn't support the initiative in Iraq - but they did support the campaign in Afghanistan (at the time the Afghanistan campaign was most often reported to be going well, so there's a substantial "sunshine soldier" phenomenon occurring here). The shallowness of this repeated cry was apparent enough even at the time, since it was most often used to bash GWB for Iraq and for the failure to capture or kill OBL himself in Afghanistan/Pakistan.
Ironies abound. "Irony" being the kindest term that applies.
Oh, I realize #2 is merely a restatement of what Stephens is saying, but #1 applies additional perspective still and #2 is worth added emphasis itself.