It May Be Too Late To Fight The War In Afghanistan

Some fairly predictable voices are being raised against the war in Afghanistan. There are always those on the left who live in a fantasy world in which no war is ever justified; and there are always those on the right who recognize no moral obligations to non-Americans, and think only of our narrow national interest.

(I keep, incidentally, running across liberals who make passing references to (roughly) "Bush's two unjustified wars," or who speak of Afghanistan as if it were simply some bit of colonial expansion. That's either jaw-dropping stupidity or jaw-dropping shortness of memory... And I think it's clear that, whether we stay or go, the right will use the decision as a club against Obama. So we can divide through by that consideration.)

My view, as I think I've made clear, was always that we should have given Afghanistan absolutely everything we had after 9/11.

Sadly, however, Bush and Cheney sent us on the bloody and disastrous $3 trillion wild-goose chase of Iraq.

Now, having ground down our military, expended our moral capital, and emptied our treasury, we face the question: what do we do in Afghanistan?

Although I am not subject to the left-wing fantasy that all wars are unjustified, nor to the right-wing fantasy that only Americans matter, I just want to make it clear that the following inference is not valid:

(1) We should have focused on Afghanistan after 9/11
Therefore
(2) We should focus on Afghanistan now.

This doesn't, of course, entail that we shouldn't focus on Afghanistan now--only that we cannot infer that we should do so now from the fact that we should have done so then.

Frankly, I don't know what I think about this issue.

I fear that the inability to eviscerate the Taliban and al Qaeda are simply the most salient opportunity costs of the Iraq war. We basically had a choice between (a) punishing the perpetrators of 9/11 and (b) embarking on an unrelated martial adventure in an unrelated country, and we chose the latter.

Those of us who thought that it was important to avenge 9/11, kill bin Laden and make a profound statement about the consequences of such attacks on the United States naturally still harbor some vestigial hope that this can somehow be accomplished eight years after the fact in Afghanistan...but this is a hope that seems more and more irrational to me.

We have to decide what to do about Afghanistan by asking what we can accomplish in 2009, not what we could have accomplished in 2003. And the answer that question is not at all clear to me.