Because land war in Asia has always worked out so well.

I await the press conference in which the President reveals that, after conferring with advisors, he has decided to go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line.

Nobel peace prize winners don't escalate wars. Shame on this closet neo-con. I know he inherited this morass but to feed the flames is no way to be labeled a peace monger. This whole thing reeks of Industrial Military Complex fixation. Gotta feed those corporate war profits. Nauseating...

In his fair and balanced way, he must have consulted heavily with the conservative pundit corps and leaders of the GOP to come up with this.

A columnist can be ambivalent

Why? He can, but why should he be? On this topic?

Self-centered rot.

Tell me again, why are we in Afghanistan? Is it to protect the poppy growers?

oh, c'mon. What is wrong with Kaplan? It's obvious what's going on here: Obama's doing what's politically expedient, as he has done in nearly every serious decision he's made in his professional life.

Rahm told him what he had to do, and he's done it. He'll keep us in Afghanistan--Graveyard of Empires--for the next 7 years, because the people who run this country find it useful to be there.

And because it'll help cement his second term.

Obama better do something good in that second term. I'm hoping. Forlornly, but hoping.

The sad part in all this is that 40 years of GOP lies have moved the overton window so far to the Right that all we'll ever get from the Democrats from now on is the equivalent of a moderate Republican from 1974. Unless or until we're willing to take on the powers-that-be in this country, take them on strongly and directly, we'll never get the window moved back.

my guess is bob dreyfuss has a good handle on unambivalence in his column today at The Nation dot com...

every day it seems that the obama admin sucks more and more...

tomorrow, i got a feeling, is going to be a big sucky day...

It's easy to go to war, when you don't have to pay for it.

Ask G.W.Bush. . .

(And Mr. Deficits Don't Matter Cheney. . .)

Honestly, what real choice is there in Afghanistan? That place was a mess before we ever went there and we, the US, made it significantly worse. Our puppet government is corrupt and weak outside the capital, there is no legal economy to speak of, half the country is made up of religious fanatics that hate us, and the other half look to us to save them.

If we partially withdraw or stay as we are we are just a target of the local insurgency. If we entirely withdraw then the Taliban and the Pashtun people will be back in power in a year. They will have no problems with killing off anyone that they feel supported the US, or anyone that they feel isn't religious enough, or gets in the way of their money. Either of those shows that the US has no political will and won't support an ally. So we take a hit to our prestige.

By surging and tying the surge to a timeline, then we set a concrete goal of when Afghanistan needs to be ready to stand on their own two feet and hopefully give them space to do it. It's risky and probably won't work, but it gives our side some space.

It might be the least bad of several really bad stratgies. Anyway, we will have to see what heppens.

Never been a huge fan of Obama, but tell me: do you really like the Taliban? Like to see their influence increase? Think Al Qaeda is misunderstood?

Story of the week so far is the Senate report on Tora Bora, stating for all time that Bush had bin Laden cornered and let him escape. I'm sure his family's business and personal ties with the bin Laden family, going back decades, had nothing to do with it; neither did our dependence on Saudi oil. If we'd had any sense, and of course we didn't, our next invasion after Afghanistan would have been Arabia, home and support of the Wahabbists who gave birth to, I can't resist, T&A.

This and half a century of drumbeating are what Obama's left with. He definitely screwed up the economic stimulus, to mildly understate the case, but on this one mark me ambivalent too.

Notice how Iraq has fallen off the media radar these days?

Now we are going to be convinced that perpetuawar in Afpak is good for us all, that it will secure our place in the anals of history (mispelling intentional).

We are in Iraq for the oil and in Afghanistan for the drugs.

Perpetuawar.

Get used to it.

Exit ramps my ass.

Dear fellow commentators:
It would be so useful if we all tried to write in complete sentences, or at least with a bit of clarity. The sloppy prose displayed above suggests sloppy thinking.
Thanks.

Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard Professor Linda Bilmes wrote a book (The 3 Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict) that showed the real cost was 3x the cost of combat operations (when you include replacing weapons, vehicles, equipment, paying for veterans who get wounded pretty much forever, interest on the money we borrow, etc etc). And they predicted the Iraq was would wreak havoc on the US economy, which certainly happened. Are we really going to do the whole thing over again, in the same way? Congressman Obey is right that we should consider a war surtax.

The idea of perpetuawar is no longer an illusion, but a reality.

We have set up dozens, if not hundreds of bases throughout the deserts and mountains of Iraqistan.

Does anyone in his right mind actually believe that we will leave either country? That our bases will be deserted?

No f**king way.

We have commited ourselves to an inter-generational struggle, that will extend beyond anyone's wildest dreams.

Waging war is what America does best.

It is ruining our economy.

A war surtax is meaningless without a draft. A draft will make it very clear to us all how costly these endeavors really are.

Iraqistan? Iraq and Afghanistan have a rather large country, Iran, in between them. Are you suggesting Obama is about to go to war with the entire mideast, without being aware of their cultural and religious differences? Somewhat unlikely considering iran's nuclear ambitions and that Iran is Shiite while the Taliban and Al Qaeda, like their Arabian birthplace, are Sunni.

This sort of thinking is rightwing American stuff, on display too prominently in the last election. I'm with E.D.

Blame Obama all you want but if our electorate didn't buy the Right's patriotic swill, he wouldn't have had to make this politically expedient decision

The Worst Business

Wait for my grounbreaking article on this to come out (LOL)! But seriously, years ago I attended a lecture by strategy guru Michael Porter of Harvard. He was talking about barriers to entry and said, "The worst kind of business is one that easy to get into (low barriers of entry) but hard to get out of." The war in Afghanistan is exactly this type of situation.

If Obama had tried to leave Afghanistan he would faced with:

1. Yells of 'defeat' from the right
2. Criticisms from the center---right that America had suffered 'a major blow to its international prestige'
3. Criticism that all the lives and money spent up to now had been wasted (The 'value of sunk costs' may be zero but that is not how people think)
4. Criticism from retired military personnel that 'We could have won the war if only....(fill in the blanks)
5. Regret from all Americans (even the ones who supported the pullout) that we had 'lost'. Whatever you might say, Americans hate to lose.

Given all of the above, it is orders of magnitude easier just to maintain the status quo (or even, as the President has chosen, slightly up the ante) than to pull out. I fear that our eventual 'retreat with honor' will have to wait until our next President, who will no doubt get elected on the platform of 'Getting us out of Afghanistan'.

On Gitmo, on environment, on energy, on war in AfPak, on the stimulus, on health care reform, on Iran and other "resets" to American foreign policy -- does it not seem like Obama is trying to do what he thinks best as well as he can in a complex political environment with independently elected opponents? He takes a long time to decide because he is used, as a college teacher and seminar leader, to hashing out complex issues at great length. Clearly he didn't want to accede to Gen. McChrystal's request for more troops, but equally clearly he had said that the war in Afghanistan was a war of necessity that had to be won. Y'all thought that Bush was too rash and unreflective, and now you have a guy whose strength is alleged to be his thoroughness and thoughtfulness.

Two more rhetorical questions: Did you really think that all these problems were easy and only looked hard because Bush was incompetent? Are you already bailing on the guy you elected (remember that he promised to prosecute the war in Afghanistan) after just 10 months in office?

I don't know whether he'll be a good president or not. He's as ambiguous after 10 months in office as Lincoln was after 10 months in office. I don't even think he is a net improvement over G. W. Bush. But get a grip!

I don't even think he is a net improvement over G. W. Bush.

I'm not always all that happy with Obama, but I don't think it will be possible for him to sink that low.

I'm just throwing this out there, but...maybe Obama's policy isn't some great political decision but because he actually believes it's the right one? He did, after all, clearly say during the election that he was going to escalate the war in Afghanistan. And, if you read things other than these message boards or Daily Kos you might discover that a lot of other people who aren't Washington Post columnists or Michelle Malkin don't necessarily believe in pulling out just yet. Hell, even some people like me who despised the Iraq War still think it's worth giving Afghanistan one more shot.

And did you even read Kaplan's piece or did you just reflexively skip it because he's on Slate and he says things that you might not agree with? He gives a pretty good argument about why pulling out is a bad idea, although he neglected to mention what's probably the biggest fear driving all of this-- the possible effect a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan could have on Pakistan and maybe possibly India which is getting nervous about all of this. You could argue with some of his conclusions or disagree about parts of it but I think it does a pretty good job of describing just what exactly this whole thing is-- a big, huge, fucking, shit sandwich of a situation, a situation where every choice to be had is just horrible. To say it's some political decision or global neocon conspiracy is not the making of an intelligent debate.

Interestingly, Emperor Obama's decision to escalate militarily in Afcrapistan comes on the 44th anniversary of the day Lyndon Johnson acceded to the military's demand to increase troops in Vietnam from 120,000 to 400,000, a decision that was at the time applauded by 82% of the American people.

So much for the value of "public support" for this kind of imperial insanity. We all know how it went the last time, with the last progressive American president flushing his progressive domestic agenda with that idiotic decision and sending us into a 40-year night of right wing fuckwittery we thought we had now emerged from.

Obama has just flushed his presidency.

It might do America some good to lose a war for once. Builds character.

Helping continue the creation of a functioning nation-state will be as important to achieving American objectives in Afghanistan as an increase in troops. As the US and its partners transfer responsibility for security to Afghan counterparts, it will be critical that the local government is capable of enforcing civilian control of the military and promoting good governance. A delegation of senior Afghan women leaders the Institute for Inclusive Security brought to the United States in October 2009 made specific recommendations that American leaders should follow as they implement programs in the days and months that follow. To view the Afghan leaders recommendations view http://www.huntalternatives.org/AfghanistanRecommendationsOct2009.cfm

This video has some good coverage of this issue- maybe you'll learn something new by watching. http://www.newsy.com/videos/tiger_comes_clean_after_voicemail_leaks