Courage

I've thought for a long time that to pull out of Afghanistan would require an act of political courage that we've never seen before, that I can recall, and that we'll never see in such a polarized country. Bob Herbert agrees, it seems:

Ultimately, the public is at fault for this catastrophe in Afghanistan, where more than 1,000 G.I.’s have now lost their lives. If we don’t have the courage as a people to fight and share in the sacrifices when our nation is at war, if we’re unwilling to seriously think about the war and hold our leaders accountable for the way it is conducted, if we’re not even willing to pay for it, then we should at least have the courage to pull our valiant forces out of it.

I think he's right that it's a shared blame. But I think the dynamic is more like this: constant bombardment by the panoply of RWS™ and disgusting inability of liberals to mount an effective response, along with the selfish need of most Americans to equate patriotism with war while avoiding really thinking about it -- much less paying for it -- makes for paralysis. Because overcoming such a charged political climate requires selfless courage; and the screamers know it well, and use it to their advantage.

About this I'm as certain as I am about tomorrow's sunrise: were we to pull out of Afghanistan, there'd be an unprecedented and coördinated barrage of invective from the RWS™, and when the next and inevitable attack on our soil occurs, President Obama would, at minimum be accused of murder. Or worse.

We're wasting lives in Afghanistan, and unending amounts of treasure. In doing so, we're making ourselves less safe, diverting that money from the home front, where it can surely be put to better use. Iraq, on which the jury is still most decidedly out, was, at one time, an actual country. Afghanistan is tribes spread about in the roughest terrain on earth, beholden to no government; and it has been so for centuries. I can't see what would change it; not even were we to send in a million troops and a few more trillions of dollars. If they won't pacify themselves, it'll never happen. They've never been a country.

Nor, were we able magically to turn Afghanistan into a western democracy, or even a pro-western whatever, would we be eliminating terrorist threats. They can come from anywhere, including, as we've seen, within our own borders. Armies can't stop it. Armies fight armies.

It's not worth it. It hasn't been worth it, ever since Bush decided to leave Afghanistan in favor of the debacle known as Iraq. If ever there was a chance to get it right -- and, frankly, I doubt there ever was -- it was then. Now, we're killing ourselves.

I wonder if, deep down somewhere, Barack Obama knows that. In the writings I've read since the McChrystal episode, it seems there's always been a strong contingent in his administration that opposed the "surge" and wanted to find a way out. But, as a war hero once asked, "How do you ask someone to be the last one to die for a mistake?" He's in too deep. Perhaps he thinks of the families of those that have died, those living with deep wounds mental and physical, and hates to tell them it was all for nothing. To tell us what we need to hear, that we lost our chance to prevail in Afghanistan when we left it for Iraq, that we've given them more than nine years to find a way and they haven't, that terrorism knows no country and that our wars have done nothing to lessen the threat but rather has raised it by recruitment and by diversion of resources -- to tell us that, to say it was a mistake by Bush to leave and a mistake by him to go back would take enormous and probably impossible political courage.

If Barack Obama doesn't have that unprecedented courage, no politician does; and, sadly, none likely ever will.

[Update: Here's an article by a person of much more credibility than I, of the same opinion about the outcome.]