Should Americans Really Consider Afghanistan the "Right" War?

Watch "Meet the Bloggers" on Friday at 1pm EST to join the discussion on U.S. policy in Afghanistan.

In the spring of 2004, Time Magazine ran a cover story posing the question: "Remember Afghanistan?" One year after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the message was clear: the war in Afghanistan, started in retaliation for 9/11 and continuing years later, was "The Forgotten War."

That was March 8, 2004. A few weeks later, in Fallujah, a group of Blackwater mercenaries were ambushed and slaughtered, their burning bodies hung from a bridge on the Euphrates River. It was, as Jeremy Scahill would describe it, "the day the war turned;" the U.S. military laid waste to the Iraqi city, the resistance to the war caught fire, and the rest, well, one can only wish the rest was history. Regardless, Iraq at the time was front page news.

Four years later, the war has fallen off the media's radar. Network coverage, consistently on the decline, has been "massively scaled back this year" alone. With recent news coverage of the occupation abysmal, perhaps it should surprise no one that Afghanistan, traditionally the more neglected of the two, should be even more marginalized. But now that's beginning to change. The U.S. presidential race -- not to mention thriving opium production and a recent succession of bloody attacks -- have shifted people's attention back to Afghanistan. The picture isn't pretty -- and it's getting worse. A Pentagon study released last month predicts a rise in already steep levels of violence in Afghanistan, reporting that the Taliban "regrouped after its fall from power and have coalesced into a resilient insurgency." "It now poses a challenge to the Afghan government's authority in some rural areas. … The Taliban is likely to maintain or even increase the scope and pace of its terrorist attacks and bombings in 2008." The trouble in Afghanistan is hardly a recent development, invisible though it has been to so many for so long. Reporting from Kabul in September 2006, Nation reporter Christian Parenti described the country "in a deepening crisis," citing government corruption and an alarming lack of security "due to Taliban insurgency and general lawlessness." Nevertheless, with the American public increasingly fed up with the war in Iraq, efforts to revive the popularity of the mission in Afghanistan are working -- even as most Americans aren't certain what the mission actually is. "Americans Say Afghanistan, not Iraq, Should be Priority," reported Congressional Quarterly on Wednesday, citing a USA Today/Gallup Poll that found that "a plurality of Americans believe the war in Afghanistan is more important than the one in Iraq by a 44 percent to 38 percent margin," As for the rest? "Ten percent say 'both equally' and 8 percent have no opinion."

" … Despite the succession of polls that say it was a mistake for the U.S. to invade Iraq, support remains high for the decision to go to war in Afghanistan, which was made in response to the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Asked if going into Afghanistan was a mistake, Americans said no by a 68 percent to 28 percent margin.

In addition, more than half of Americans would support sending additional troops to Afghanistan and diverting troops from Iraq to Afghanistan.

What polls like these reveal, beyond the ease with which the candidates' rhetoric on Afghanistan melds with public opinion, is a pretty glaring misunderstanding of the war on Afghanistan, or, as Time called it on its cover this week, "The Good War," by most Americans. The notion that Afghanistan was the "right front" of the so-called "War on Terror" has long been perpetuated by everyone from Barack Obama to Jon Stewart, who has cheerleaded the war for years. As he told Colin Powell in 2005, "The Afghanistan war, man did I dig that. I'd like to go again."

Note to Mr. Stewart: the war in Afghanistan is far from over. In fact, as former UN ambassador Richard Holbrooke wrote in the Washington Post earlier this year, "the conflict in Afghanistan will be far more costly and much, much longer than Americans realize. This war, already in its seventh year, will eventually become the longest in American history, surpassing even Vietnam."

Indeed, just weeks ago, Congress approved a major spending measure for the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan that makes it clear the U.S. has no plans to leave Afghanistan anytime soon, including $62 million for an ammunition storage facility and $41million for a 30-megawatt power plant at Bagram Air Base. According to the Pentagon, "As a forward operating site, Bagram must be able to provide for a long term, steady state presence which is able to surge to meet theater contingency requirements."

Plans to escalate the military presence in Afghanistan come at a time when, like Iraq, the country is in dire need of humanitarian assistance. "Falling Short," a report released this past March by Oxfam, lays out what's needed in financial assistance to help rebuild Afghanistan. As the title would suggest, it's a lot more than what's being provided. "The prospects for peace in Afghanistan are being undermined because Western countries are failing to deliver on their promises of aid to the tune of $10 billion and because aid going to the country is used ineffectively," the report concludes.

Whether a moral and effective way to end the occupation in Afghanistan exists, the larger problem is that the notion of open-ended war currently known as the "War on Terror" continues to function as legitimate U.S. policy. One would hope that a new administration might mean a new perspective on the use of U.S. power, given how devastating the "War on Terror" has been, both in terms of its victims abroad and the erosion of democracy at home. Unfortunately, there are few signs that the departure of the Bush administration will bring something more imaginative or humane than a military solution to the problems we face abroad. (This is not a new problem, of course; just look at the ongoing "War on Drugs.") For now, the overheated language of the presidential campaign promises to provide even less to be optimistic about. While certainly it is reassuring that Barack Obama considers diplomacy a legitimate way to address potential threats to national security -- especially compared to the madness of John "Bomb Iran" McCain -- he nevertheless has consistently adopted the language of the War on Terror to articulate his foreign policy ideas. In an example I pointed out earlier this year, in a 2007 speech in Chicago, Obama described "five ways America will begin to lead again when I'm president."

The first way was by "building the first truly 21st century military … and showing wisdom in how we deploy it." Such a military would "stay on the offense, from Djibouti to Kandahar." "No president should ever hesitate to use force -- unilaterally if necessary -- to protect ourselves and our vital interests …"

Obama's plan to withdraw troops from Iraq to send to Afghanistan should surprise no one who has followed his plans as would-be commander in chief.

As Afghanistan once again becomes a topic for discussion nearly seven years after the invasion, it's about time Americans realize that it is a country that represents much more than a battleground against al-Qaeda. It is a country whose population has suffered for decades at the hands war and foreign occupation. As for the "good war," as Marjorie Cohn points out, "the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was as illegal as the invasion of Iraq." "The invasion of Afghanistan was not legitimate self-defense under [the UN Charter] because the attacks on September 11 were criminal attacks, not 'armed attacks' by another country. Afghanistan did not attack the United States."