Afghanistan: Is the war doomed to failure?

“There are not a lot of good weeks in Afghanistan,” said The New York Times in an editorial. “But last week was particularly bad.” Our military losses—26 NATO soldiers killed, a U.S. helicopter shot down—were grimmer than usual. But more troubling still were the ominous signs away from the battlefield. President Hamid Karzai was reported to be secretly seeking his own deal with the Taliban, having concluded that the U.S. can’t defeat the insurgents militarily. In another clear snub to the U.S., said Jackson Diehl in The Washington Post, Karzai abruptly dismissed the two most pro-American members of his Cabinet. Then Gen. Stanley McChrystal announced that the long-awaited campaign to secure Kandahar in southern Afghanistan would be delayed “because of what he described as difficulty in winning local support.” Most Afghans have concluded that the U.S. is not their friend, and is simply trying to buttress an existing network of corrupt government officials and local power brokers. There is still hope, but “the trend lines in Afghanistan do not look good.”

That’s an understatement, said Bob Herbert in The New York Times. We have spent nine futile years in this graveyard of empires, and the 18-year-old American soldiers losing their lives there were just 9 years old when it all began, a few months after 9/11. It’s time to face reality. We are never going to empower “the unempowerable Afghan forces,” or stabilize a “hopelessly corrupt and incompetent civil society.” In ordering 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan last year, Obama promised “a mission that is clearly defined.” But that “clearly defined mission never materialized,” and the only question is whether Obama can find “the courage to leave.”

Don’t worry about that, said Iain Martin in The Wall Street Journal. Obama has already committed to start withdrawing troops next July, and the real—if unacknowledged—focus of our military efforts at the moment is to “organize an orderly retreat and call it a victory.” If we retreat, said Investor’s Business Daily, Obama will have lost Afghanistan “just as unexpectedly as President Bush won Iraq.” Make no mistake. From a military standpoint, the war in Afghanistan was and is winnable. A nation that defeated the might of the “Nazi war machine” could, if it wanted, get the best of a few thousand barefoot Taliban fighters armed with secondhand AK-47s. But that would require a different president, one with the stomach to see the job through.

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Unfortunately, Americans simply don’t seem to care either way, said Peter Beinart in TheDailyBeast.com. The country has entered a strange state of “emotional isolationism,” in which foreign wars are less gripping than partisan bickering over health care or the plight of seabirds in the Gulf of Mexico. The silence from the Left is particularly deafening, said Michael Cohen in The New Republic. Liberal activists who so “aggressively asserted themselves” against the war in Iraq have largely fallen “into acquiescence and even silence” over Afghanistan. Maybe the Left doesn’t want to beat up on a Democratic president. Maybe it’s that liberals were chastened by the apparent success of Bush’s surge strategy in Iraq. But the lack of any public opposition leaves Obama facing pressure only from his generals and the hawks in his Cabinet, who always see victory if we stay just another year. In reality, “the warning signs are blinking red.” So where’s the opposition to a war that seems more hopeless every day?