Afghanistan, reconsidered

Leave it to Bob Woodward, half of that storied team of Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate scandal 35 years ago, to get me to thinking about Afghanistan again. Not that it's ever far from my mind.

When you have a young son who's in the Army, you read the newspapers and magazines and tell yourself that he won't be deploying for several months, maybe even a year or more, to either Afghanistan or Iraq. At the same time, you read these articles and watch the TV news reports and try to come to some understanding of what our interests are in that part of the world and whether it makes sense to be there...regardless of the soldier in your family.

It was obvious a long time ago that George Bush invaded the wrong country after 9/11. What a waste of manpower and money and public support on such a misadventure...

And so here we are eight years into the Afghanistan War, launched ostensibly to root out Osama bin Laden, with little to nothing to show for our efforts. You've got a corrupt or incompetent government with allegations of fraud in the recent presidential election, some of the most formidable terrain in the world, an impoverished and largely illiterate people whose loyalties flip back and forth between U.S. and NATO forces, the Taliban and their individual tribes, based mainly on who can help them feed their families.

As Woodward reported this week, Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, warns that the war can be lost if we don't commit more troops and quickly implement an effective counterinsurgency strategy. President Obama and his advisers are reviewing his assessment as public opinion polls show waning support for our involvement there. Congressional leaders -- i.e., top Democrats like Nancy Pelosi -- have already signaled their reluctance to get in deeper. And who can blame them?

The parallels to Vietnam can't be overlooked. There, we tried to force our values and military superiority on a people whose resiliency we grossly overestimated. Back then, we were fighting North Vietnam, backed by China. Now, Afghanistan is our ally and the real threat to the United States is posed by al-Qaida cells in Pakistan, which we can't invade because it too is an ally -- though probably the most unstable and erratic of our "friends."

A week ago Sunday, we devoted quite a bit of space in print and online to the Afghanistan War:
-- A thoughtful analysis by Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich, asking "How committed is Obama to the Afghanistan War?"
-- A "Letter from Kabul," an on-the-ground report from a Lewis & Clark College professor, Zaher Wahab, who's been going back every year to visit his family and help rebuild his country's higher education system.
-- An op-ed piece by Los Angeles Times columnist Doyle McManus, in which he contends "Afghanistan isn't Vietnam -- yet."

We followed up with an op-ed by one of our Oregon congressmen, David Wu, who had just come back from Afghanistan and announced his support for our continuing presence: "War in Afghanistan: an ongoing threat to our security."

And today our editorial board weighed in: "The general speaks. Now what?"

I don't know that I have the answers. Like Wu, I fear that withdrawing from Afghanistan will give the Taliban carte blanche to continue recruiting young men to their cause and plant the seeds for another potential attack on Americans, here or elsewhere in the world. I understand there's a difference between the religious extremism of the Taliban and the deadly militancy of al-Qaida, but it seems like the line would get blurred awfully quickly if we were to pull out entirely.

Editorial cartoon by Jack Ohman, The Oregonian