The sudden outbreak of talk about just walking away from the Afghanistan war before it’s too late is dangerously blithe.
If you wouldn’t mind pretending you don’t notice while a nation is driven back 2,000 years — and its women into de facto slavery — then abandoning Afghanistan to the Taliban would be an easy option. Afghanistan weighs only as feathers on the world’s scale.
Or it would if Pakistan were not next door, if Pakistan were not nuclear-armed, if its political system was stable and its population hadn’t shown itself vulnerable to the Islamist proselytizing of the Taliban. And if the Taliban, in turn, had not been a willing host and protector of Osama bin Laden and his merry band of al-Qaida terrorists.
Pakistan did recently pull its socks up and, with U.S. assistance, drive the Taliban from the Swat Valley, but too often Pakistani intelligence and military alike have proved indifferent and ineffectual in such challenges, and a growing radicalism in Pakistan’s Muslim population offers succor to Taliban advances.
If the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, Pakistan would be a temptation. Think al-Qaida with nukes.
To those of us who pooh-poohed the domino theory as justification for the Vietnam War — the argument that if Vietnam fell, all of southeast Asia would be sucked up by international communism — offering a variation for Afghanistan is, um, awkward. After all, we were right. Vietnam fell and, presto, it was international communism that tanked.
But candidate Barack Obama was correct. Afghanistan was the right place for the U.S. to fight from the start — the source of 9/11 and potential staging area for more such — and Iraq was just a distracting hobby for neocons. And President Barack Obama has followed through. The administration has added 21,000 U.S. troops, sacked the commander there and installed Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who sensibly argues that the way to prevail in the long run is to stop killing civilians and start protecting them.
Yet McChrystal himself says the war is not going well. He is likely to ask for still more troops. A big increase in funds for civil rebuilding appears to be essential, too, if we are to see this thing through. Congress is jittery. Commentators with considerable competence in the field are shying.
U.S. and NATO casualties are up sharply in Afghanistan. Gains are tentative. European involvement, always politically shaky, is increasingly wobbly. Polling suggests Americans are drifting into opposition to the war. The Afghan government is incompetent and corrupt. Ditto its military.
The White House and the Democratic Congress could still plead, credibly, that the near decade of Bush administration negligence left the situation there irreparable. But even so, a hard choice looms for the new administration: Own the war by raising the stakes or, justly or not, own the consequences of quitting it.
Any decision has to be paired with a major commitment to work with Pakistan to shield it from the spillover, and any decision is bound to produce downsides that at home could be exploited for partisan advantage.
If instead of coiling to pounce the Republican leadership would signal that, at least on this very grave matter, it is willing to put the “loyal” back into “loyal opposition” and work with the administration, the prospects for sound and durable policy would grow immeasurably.
Two heads are especially better than one if one isn’t razzing the other.
Tom Teepen writes for Cox Newspapers. E-mail address: teepencolumn@earth link.net.
