Time is up in Afghanistan

While the New York Times reported this week that Gen. Petraeus and other US military officials in Afghanistan are arguing for more time to implement their counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan, it seems pretty clear that it is actually time to hasten our withdrawal and scale back our goals.

When we first invaded Afghanistan in 2001, our goals were clear and sensible: Attack and destroy Al Qaeda camps, kill or capture Al Qaeda members and leaders, and remove from power the Taliban leadership that had provided Al Qaeda with a safe haven from which to operate. While we allowed Osama bin Laden and some of the Al Qaeda leadership to escape to Pakistan, we otherwise accomplished these clear and achievable goals.

After that, our goals became increasingly unclear and less achievable. According to the same NYT article this week, President Obama's goals include:

"securing Afghan population centers so that Al Qaeda could not use the country again as a launching pad for attacks on the United States, promoting good government, anticorruption and rule-of-law measures..."

Al Qaeda is now using Pakistan, Yemen, and other countries as bases of operations. Permanently preventing it from returning to Afghanistan is not necessary - Afghanistan is not indispensable to bin Laden.

I am all in favor of "good government," fighting corruption, and promoting the rule of law, but those are not clear goals that are observable and achievable. How would one know when we've achieved them? Do we keep tens of thousands of US soldiers there until we are sure we have? And should we spend billions of dollars and risk countless more US (and Afghani) lives while we ignore violence and horrors in Darfur, Congo, and elsewhere?

Moreover, we really can't afford this war anymore. Sure, if it were a battle to the death between us and bin Laden, I'd want us to sell as many Treasury bonds as we could to finance it. But I am not willing to mortgage our country's future (my daughters' futures) to pursue Obama's vague goals. It is time to invest in our future, rebuild our infrastructure, develop new energy technologies, and fix our schools. As Tom Friedman says, the nation-building we most urgently need is right here at home.

I really don't like the overdrawn Vietnam War analogies, but it is starting to feel like Obama is acting like LBJ - he knows we can't "win," but he is determined to not be the president who "loses."