It is easy to be pessimistic about Afghanistan. The war has been going on for 10 bloody years. It is costing $10 billion a month — three times more than it was at its beginning. One thousand, five hundred U.S. troops have died there; many thousands more have been horribly wounded or sent home crippled in mind and spirit. What balances these negatives?
Osama bin Laden is dead. Al-Qaida has been decimated. The Taliban haven’t been in control of the country since the war’s first months. Afghanistan is no longer a haven for terrorists. Girls are being educated. Women have the right to vote. The people have at least seen models of government that give a majority the right to decide. Alternatives to a poppy economy and a warlord government have been put on display — for the people to adopt or reject.
An impressive list, but it would be a politically motivated exaggeration to say that the U.S. and its allies have gotten their trillion dollars worth.
President Barack Obama said Wednesday night he would do as he promised. He will bring the 30,000 “surge” troops home within a year. All combat operations will end by 2014. He is, he said several times, pledged to scale down U.S. involvment “responsibly.”
What that adverb means is that this 10-year-old war is scheduled to last at least 13 years — and may drag on still longer if there is no “responsible” way to bring the last platoon home.
POLLSTERS SAY that 62 percent of the American people want the troops — all of them — brought back home as “soon as possible.” Just how soon that is will become more apparent as the months slip by and the news from that desolate land builds hope or destroys what hope is left.
Wednesday night the president tied Afghanistan to the Arab Spring and suggested that our troops there were encouraging the “democratic aspirations that are now washing across the Arab world. We will,” he pledged, “support those revolutions with fidelity to our ideals, with the power of our example, and with an unwaving belief that all human beings deserve to live with freedom and dignity.”
We shouldn’t raise eyebrows at this idealism. Because most Americans share these values, our nation pours wealth beyond counting and heart-rending torrents of blood pursuing our goals in nations that do not understand them, let alone share them.
What the president did say to all who listened to him surely applauded was that we should turn from fighting rewardless wars to rebuilding our own country.
“We must,” he said, “unleash innovation that creates new jobs and industry, while living within our means. We must rebuild our infrastructure and find new and clean sources of energy, and most of all, after a decade of passionate debate, we must recapture the common purpose that we shared at the beginning of this time of war. … America, it is time to focus on nation-building here at home. .. “
YES, SIR, it surely is. Please take our country from here to there.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
