Still Cleaning Up the Mess

The President's speech on Afghanistan was nothing short of what was exactly expected.

We're in trouble there. To wit: We aren't doing what we said we were going to do eight years ago.

But then: It's not the President's fault. It's George W. Bush's.

This is about cleaning up the mess and walking away with our heads, well; if not held high, then not between our knees, either.

This has no-win written all over it. At least, no-decisive-win.

The British can tell you that. The Russians can tell you that. Even George W. Bush can tell you that, especially having made the mistakes he made.

First: A clear lack of commitment to that war. They had Osama bin Laden trapped, and let him go, or so said a very recent analysis. Would that have ended everything, every threat? Of course not. But bin Laden is a symbol for terrorist resistance, and his elimination could have, and still can have, a strong effect on the rest of the efforts against us.

Would George Washington's capture (and, I'd bet, eventual execution) have stopped the American Revolution? Not by itself, but it would have put a serious dent in colonial resistance. And the British let him off the hook more than once.

Second: The Bush Administration--I believe--saw the stickiness of the effort in Afghanistan as being too long-range and long-run, and opted (while keeping a reasonably accountable level of troops there) for what they saw was a quicker, and more decisive, assault on Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

It's kind of like the spouse who now sees that the marriage was something of a mistake, but instead of divorce, gets involved in stamp collection: You kind of give up on the whole business, but you don't have to explain anything.

Either way, it backfires. People get tired of it all. And we are tired of Afghanistan, tired of American democracy-building where it's clear that it's off to another awful start.

How soon we forget that, in our own democracy, the shelf-life of foreign wars comes out to be about three years. After that, somebody's going to pay the piper.

Afghanistan's ineptitude in pulling off national elections (akin to our 2000 fiasco, so let's not get haughty here) reminds any historian oh-so-well of Ngo Dinh Diem's bullying in South Vietnam in 1956, where, out of 450,000 total votes, he got 607,000. And people warned Lyndon Johnson over and over again, in 1964 and 1965, of the futility of increasing our efforts there.

Of course, we aren't talking about anything near that kind of commitment in Afghanistan. We simply don't have the people to sustain the kind of effort that absorbed the kind of casualties that we had in Vietnam.

But the media attention will now be paid to Afghanistan at a level heretofore unpaid. The casualties will rise. Those kinds of stories will now be written and broadcasted and blogged.

It will seem out of proportion. But it won't be. American men and women will continue to die. Americans will need to see palpable results.

We will need to look closely. And we will, for a while.

That's why Obama needs to put that July 2011 date out there. Yes, it has political motivation written all over it--not only for Obama himself (See? We're all done with wars now. Told you.), but for Karzai: You better get your stuff together, dude. We're going home in a year and a half, and you'll be on your own.

One thing, and only one thing, will prevent that: A major terrorist attack in this country. Should that happen, Obama will start sounding just like Bush did when he rather illogically kept saying that we have to fight over there to stop terrorism over here--as if Afghanistan is the only other possible place in which terrorists are doing any training, any planning, any pushing off for operations.

We aren't saying that about Iraq any longer. We've installed democracy there, you know. That's why we're going home. Mission (gulp) accomplished.

We will leave when the money runs out. And it will run out sooner rather than later this time--not because of what Obama did, but because of what Bush did. And Obama is left holding the bag, cleaning up the mess.

Mister Mark