A distressing number of people in the comments to this post were not just disagreeing with the things I’ve said about Afghanistan (which is fair enough) but instead asserting that I’ve been failing to address the topic out of some kind of cowardly desire to follow someone else’s lead. If you’re curious, though, you can [...]
A distressing number of people in the comments to this post were not just disagreeing with the things I’ve said about Afghanistan (which is fair enough) but instead asserting that I’ve been failing to address the topic out of some kind of cowardly desire to follow someone else’s lead. If you’re curious, though, you can always check out this list of posts tagged “Afghanistan.”
But to sum up my thoughts, I don’t think we should be heading for the exits in Afghanistan just yet. We have an interest in doing more to fight al-Qaeda and in weaken pro-Qaeda Taliban factions. Meanwhile, public opinion in Afghanistan is still reasonably friendly to the foreign military presence. I do, however, think it’s important that we set ourselves up to end the war sooner rather than later—that means lowering expectations and setting realistic goals.
I don’t know how to evaluate the decision to send more troops to Afghanistan. I’ve heard plausible strategic visions for Afghanistan that involve sending more troops their. But the administration decided to announce the increase in force-levels before announcing the results of their strategic review. That decision about the sequence of events doesn’t seem very smart to me. But the decision about the sequence is going to be much less consequential than the actual results of the review and the most important thing there is going to be goals. I think if we could do history over again, the smart thing to have done would have been to have stayed out of Iraq. Then in 2002 and 2003, when the United States was very popular in Afghanistan we would have had more resources available to provide more comprehensive security and do more comprehensive development. Having made a bad decision to invade Iraq, if we’d started withdrawing from Iraq in early 2005 I think that still would have been soon enough to “go big” in Afghanistan—to send in more resources, more development, and to adopt a deeper, more ambitious, more comprehensive strategy. Even if we’d done what congressional Democrats wanted to and started withdrawing from Iraq in early 2007 this might have worked.
But none of those things happened. Consequently, we reached a point where the Afghan public is losing patience with us. There are things we can do to try to turn that around in the short-run—killing fewer civilians should help—but either way I think it means that we need to start looking for plausible offramps: A relatively narrow set of political and military goals combined with a willingness to cut deals with just about anyone willing to cut deals with us.
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