Obama's election opened Pandora's Box and one of the things that flew out was Hope. No good change comes without Hope as one of its wellsprings. There is much justified anger at Obama's War on Afghanistan. You've seen it here and you'll see more of it as the Afghanistan debacle continues to take and spoil lives and sap our strength as a people.
But Hope remains a necessary ingredient for those of us who oppose this war. We know it will draw cynical comments from those who see it as pie-in-the-sky utopianism (although pie-in-the-sky pushed by religion or politicians is OK?). Cynicism for them is just "realism," not the product of a successful manipulation by those who want us to think nothing can be done. The older I get the less cynical I am. Looking around me I see not just suicide bombers and airplane bombers but also an increasingly connected world and a huge mass of people who are talking (and singing) to each other and who don't believe that what they've been served as "necessary reality" is at all necessary and shouldn't be a reality:
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My hope wasn't diminished by the recent Afghanistan decision. Obama has devised an exit strategy based on his understanding of the conditions on the ground rather than left or right wing dogma. That is a win for hope and reason. As he continues to do his best to untie the knots of the past administration I am reassured by his performance thus far.
Max: It's the "facts on the ground" with this Adminisration that sap my optimism about it. You are telling me to trust him. Why? Even his own administration says we will be there for years, number unspecified. Qucksand. Expensive quicksand. Swallowing lives and money.
I suspect that Obama is content to let those in his administration/military who would prefer a never ending military commitment to believe that they will get it but that he himself is not wed to that approach. I don't have a deep well of trust for many things related to our foreign entanglements but Obama has never articulated anything like the Bush/Cheney doctrine of a never ending war on an emotion "terror"... so I take comfort in that. His approach seems more driven by the reality that a small group of zealots currently based in the Afghanistan/Pakistan region have stated their desire and demonstrated their ability to kill non-combatants in the West. As a non-combatant in the West I think a few years of focused commitment to addressing that as opposed to the prior years of un-focused involvement while we pursued phantom yellow cake toting terrorists in Baghdad is a reasonable policy to pursue. Not my first choice by the way. Reflexively I would have preferred a rapid pull back from both Iraq and Afghanistan but a reasonable one. If after a period of focused commitment the needle hasn't moved and the administration says just 18 more months. I'll change my tune and I suspect I won't be alone.
The 'facts on the ground' are that there is a population that has been abused and exploited by successive corrupt governments (the current Karzai gove. seems to be one of the worst) and is turning to the Taliban as a 'liberation front' (in spite of their bad rep.).
The 'terrorists' are gone to the hills of Pakistan... less than 100 by CIA estimates. These can (and should) be pursued via a 'police action'. The full scale military occupation just creates more terrorists who hate us as well as wastes our resources and lives.
I would have liked to see Obama keep his promises to get us out of war. Instead we have a new 'war president'... same as the old war president... 'fool me once, shame on you... fool me twice... uh.. duh... don't get fooled again.
The Karzai government is more par for the course than one of the worst Afghanistan has seen--weak and corrupt.
But it does, maybe, have potential to do better. We just leave now, the country will be back to civil war in weeks--and the cost of this on the civilian population will not be insignificant (they would dwarf the cost of this war to us) and it will be on our slate, since back in 2002 we invaded and overthrew the government that had ended the civil war. Because of this, what happens there now is our responsibility. Not that we have to guarantee a good outcome, but we now owe Afghanistan some chance at political stability before we leave.
Obama winning in 08 does not erase the past or the obligations the past administration put us under. The time to have arbitrarily stopped this war was in 02, before it got rolling. Once we went in and changed things more to our liking, we obliged ourselves to make an honest effort to leave the country better than we found it.
Personally I don't approve of the idea that America can just travel the world toppling governments, causing chaos, and then hitting the road soon as it feels like it, regardless of the consequences to the country invaded. I think America bears responsibility for its past actions, even if fulfilling them comes at some cost.
Oran: I agree with the last part. We broke it, now we should do our part to fix it. I would call that reparations. As far as the current government, its reach is only Kabul, at least according to reports I have heard. So we are propping up a weak, corrupt city mayor with no one even predicting further success for years and then not even confident of it. It would be cheaper and more humane to bribe every citizen of the country (or in my terms pay them a decent reparations) then to stay and try to turn the country into something it isn't yet and may decide it never wants to be. As for it returning to civil war, a civil war assumes a nation that has broken apart, not fiefdoms existing in uneasy but dynamic equilibrium, which is the way it was before foreign intervention. It's not a civil war when two warlords fight each other. If that's the way they want to do it, it's not up to us to decide otherwise, especially as our way has made things worse.
The Taliban will fight to gain the level of control they had before--they aren't tribal traditionalists, but ideologically driven anti-modernists. There's no going back to the squabbling fiefdoms of yore because a) everyone knows there's advantages to getting control of the nation-state apparatus, so that will always be an incentive to the struggle of all against all; and b) one or more of those fiefdoms will become hosts to forces inamicable to the US, to Pakistan, to China, to Iran, to Russia and to India, and each of these will sponsor proxies in the region who will struggle to eliminate the proxies of the others, meaning serious, protracted civil war. This is more or less an inevitability in a weak-state situation in Afghanistan.
The trouble with Afghanistan is that no one has the power to rule it well, but practically everyone has the power to turn it into bloody chaos. With the rise of India, Russia and China as significant world powers, and the more acute security concerns of the US, the stakes are higher now than they were in the 90s. The chances that there will be a return to modestly bad squabbling fiefdoms seems pretty remote.