Afghanistan Agonistes

[Geee]

National Review:

Afghanistan Agonistes
Obama needs to shake free of his past rhetoric, commit to our mission in Afghanistan, and give Petraeus a chance to do the job he has taken on.

The growing consensus is that the United States and its NATO allies cannot prevail in their aim of creating a stable constitutional government in Afghanistan, free of radical Taliban insurrectionists who will facilitate terrorism beyond their borders and seek to reinstitute their medieval theocracy.

We need to calm down and take a deep breath. Here are ten considerations that suggest that Afghanistan is hardly lost.

1. General Petraeus. By all accounts he is an historic figure. Take his willingness to step down from Centcom, after achieving global fame, only to enter into the Inferno of Afghanistan, at a time when he has seen nonstop service and dealt with health issues — and when there is not much that can be added to his reputation but a great deal that might diminish it in Afghanistan.

All that is in marked contrast, for example, to the 2003 behavior of Gen. Tommy Franks, who did the opposite: He retired abruptly after basking in the glow of a three-week victory — even as he saw the insurgency brewing — seemingly in order to capitalize on his newfound and transitory fame. Petraeus’s moral capital and past successes are worth a great deal, here and abroad, and bring a new dimension to the struggle — even though he will be apparently working with diplomatic personnel quite unlike the gifted and selfless Ryan Crocker.

Remember, he surged in Iraq without the sort of wide-scale criticism over his rules of engagement that has been directed at current counterinsurgency methods in Afghanistan. Again, for a national icon to willingly step down into the fray, when conventional wisdom is writing Afghanistan off, and under the aegis of former senators — Biden, Clinton, Obama — who deprecated his efforts when he most needed public support is nothing short of heroic. And that too will help for a while in rallying military and civilian opinion behind the effort.

2. The mission. President Obama needs to remind America of the mission. We seek to foster a stable constitutional system in Afghanistan that will keep radical Islamists from offering sanctuary to international terrorists. That is our main objective. Shutting down the opium industry, fostering a civil society that does not butcher its own, and enlisting the support of Pakistan to stop terrorism — all these are important corollaries and aid our objective, but are ipsis factis not the main reason why we are fighting in Afghanistan. For nearly a decade, those on the left have simply defined Afghanistan as not Iraq and left it at that — without telling us why in fact they would fight the “good war.” Now they must do so without invoking Bush or Iraq: We need to hear from the president what Afghanistan is, rather than what it is not.

3. Losses. We have suffered tragic deaths, but they must be seen through the prism of other, far more lethal and difficult conflicts. Through 2007, America had lost cumulatively about the same number of troops in Afghanistan that we lost in just that one year in Iraq. Indeed, in the single year 2004 — three years after the war began in Afghanistan — America had lost a total of 52 soldiers; in contrast, in 2006, similarly three years after the commencement of the Iraq war, 822 were killed in Iraq — a figure 15 times higher. The total American fatalities in nearly nine years are 1,130 — less than 2 percent of those lost in Vietnam. Afghanistan is no Iraq, much less a Vietnam. In a war nearly a decade long, the United States has been remarkably adept in not losing its soldiers.