Thank you, George Will.
Those are words I never thought I’d write, just as I never thought I’d write the words “upper extremity injury.” But times change, we adjust, and we move on.
So I thank George Will for not writing another screed against wearing blue jeans and for instead weighing in on the need to withdraw our forces from Afghanistan.
The question isn’t whether he’s right or wrong — or whether, since he’s a conservative stalwart and wears a bow tie, Will can call for a war to end and not simultaneously be labeled an American-hater who advocates cutting and running. That leads to the obvious question: How many years do you have to spend in a country before the cut-and-run concept no longer applies?
The real issue, though, is that now, finally, we may actually get a genuine debate on Afghanistan.
It’s shocking that we’ve never had a real debate — or, for that matter, much of a discussion — on the most recent iteration of the long, long war there. It’s the war most people don’t quite remember is taking place — unless you know someone risking his/her life there. It’s the war that the TV networks have, for the most part, found too expensive to cover and one that just doesn’t draw ratings on cable. (I know; maybe if Jon Gosselin held a pool party in Kabul . . .)
Once, Afghanistan was the war everyone agreed on, the war that followed 9/11, the war to break up al- Qaeda, the war that was supposed to get Osama bin Laden. But bin Laden and Mullah Omar apparently slipped over the border into the lawless lands of Pakistan, and the Bush- Cheney team found itself another war to fight in Iraq.
Now Iraq is winding down and Afghanistan is ratcheting up, and somehow we barely find the time to discuss the change. Let’s recap:
• Americans are dying in Afghanistan, in record numbers, and we don’t talk about it.
• We used to worry a lot about Taliban outrages and what happens to Afghan girls whose schools were being closed or worse — and we don’t talk about that either.
• We all read “The Kite Runner,” which was once a staple at book clubs and at least gave us some attachment to the place — and some of us even watched “Charlie Wilson’s War.” It seems like a long time ago.
You may remember that during the recent presidential campaign, the war in Iraq was still a hot topic. Obama argued that Iraq was the wrong war — and that we never finished the job in Afghanistan. Then the economy fell apart, and fighting wars suddenly seemed less important.
The conventional wisdom had been that whoever succeeded Bush would be left with cleaning up his mess and taking the blame for whatever else would go wrong. It was the conventional wisdom that turned out to be wrong. Iraq may yet fall into further disarray, but no one will pay for it because almost no one, except for the true neocons, cares. And the truest neocons have moved on to Iran.
Here’s a sad truth: The fight about Iraq was always a fight about George W. Bush. Since Obama has become president, the anti-war left has gone mostly silent about what’s going on in Afghanistan. Since no one is really arguing against the war, no one is real ly much arguing for it either.
That will change now that fatalities are going up, which means the news will carry reports of IEDs again. I’m not sure what Obama’s strategy is in Afghanistan. He hasn’t exactly spent much time talking about it. He has called it “a war of necessity,” however, which means he will necessarily send more troops.
The news is not good, not when generals use words like “deteriorating” to describe the situation. In his report, Gen. Stanley McChrystal calls the situation “serious” but says success is “achievable.” That’s another way to say that more troops are needed for a new counterinsurgency. Here’s a quiz for you: How many troops do we have there now?
Obama says we are fighting to deny al-Qaeda a sanctuary, although it could be argued that it’s already found one in Pakistan. It’s hardly the only issue. There is the Taliban-in- Pakistan problem, and the very real concerns about what might happen to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. There is, of course, the virtue of taking on the Taliban, wherever it is. But there is the problem of fighting in a large, mountainous country with an ineffective and yet corrupt government, one that just completed an unreliable national election. Here’s a nice touch: Hamid Karzai’s would-be vice president is thought to be tied to the poppy-growing industry.
In America, there is a reflexive sense that we’ve been fighting there for a long time and that the results haven’t been promising. We were told the war against terrorism would be a different kind of war, but it has looked — in Iraq, in Afghanistan— exactly like every other war.
In a recent Washington Post-ABC poll, 51 percent said the war in Afghanistan is not worth fighting.
I’m a little surprised by the number — but only because I’m surprised 51 percent of us had thought that much about Afghanistan at all.
Mike Littwin writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-5428 or mlittwin@denverpost.com.
