Greg Scoblete wishes we had waged a more narrowly focused war:
[I]t's worth pointing out that the U.S. was never supposed to a launch a war against Afghanistan. It was supposed to be against several hundred Arabs and a hodge-podge of other nationalities who had taken up shop in Afghanistan to plot terrorist attacks, plus a slice of the Afghan population that thought sheltering them was a good idea. When the Bush administration largely accomplished that in early 2002, it decided to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by turning the war into a quest to give Afghanistan something it had not had in decades: a stable government.
Michael Tomasky blames Afghanistan failures on going to war "on the cheap" with "with only 12,000 troops to start." He warns Americans that we can't wash our hands yet:
[W]hat’s happening in Afghanistan and across the region is the beginning of a transformation toward freedom that will probably take at least two generations to make serious progress. The United States can’t sit off to the side while that happens. We have to stay engaged with these countries, and some of that engagement (horrors!) will inevitably involve military and intelligence work.
Really? Why exactly? The lesson, presumably, is that even a super-power can find it impossible to understand distant foreign conflicts very well. When such regions are in turmoil, intervention becomes even more fraught. Yes, we have interests and need to defend them, even as far away as Afghanistan. But minimalism and restraint are what matter here, no? Or is every intervention guaranteed to justify countless more?
(Photo by Haraz N. Ghanbari/AP.)
The Dish 