Afghanistan: Iraq All Over Again

Monday's New York Times ran an article that drew dark parallels to the news out of Iraq. "Ragtag Taliban Show Tenacity in Afghanistan," read the headline, the latest in a stream of similar dispatches, which come on the heels of a Pentagon report forecasting heightened violence in the country. It appears that regrouped and reinforced fighters known as the Taliban are proving a formidable opponent for the U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan -- ground zero, supposedly, of the so-called "War on Terror." Here in the United States, this has prompted what the Times describes as a "fresh round of soul-searching" over the conflict. But the question being grappled with, according to the article -- "how a relatively ragtag insurgency has managed to keep the world's most powerful armies at bay" -- is all too familiar; it is identical, in fact, to the question asked about the resistance in Iraq, which turned the mission from a "cakewalk" into a bloodbath. Nearly seven years into the war on Afghanistan -- and five years into the war on Iraq -- has it occurred to anyone that maybe we're asking the wrong question?

Afghanistan was a frustrating topic of conversation on last week's episode of "Meet the Bloggers," not because of my fellow panelists -- Baratunde Thurston and Roberto Lovato -- or the guest of the week -- the sharp-witted Rachel Maddow -- but because so many people have apparently settled upon a disconcertingly simple answer to what is an impossibly complex question. As the show proceeded, we ran an online poll: Should we send more troops to Afghanistan? The result: Some 60 percent of respondents watching -- a mostly progressive crowd -- said "yes." This closely mirrors a recent USA Today/Gallup Poll, which found that a majority of Americans favor taking troops out of Iraq and sending them to Afghanistan.

Online, those who voted "yes" provided some insights:

"We went to Afghanistan for the purpose of capturing Osama bin Laden and disbanding the Taliban that was providing him with a base," wrote one person, who complained that "this discussion seems to be premised on an assumption that our effort in Afghanistan has morphed into a war on Afghanistan." (Perhaps the commenter is unaware of the scale of civilian casualties we have inflicted.) Another reminded us that "we are discussing a country with people that are terrorized by groups of extremists. … It is our job as one of the strongest powers to help them and show them a way out of the living in fear and in poverty." On the question of sending troops, another asked, "How can you nation-build, destroy poppie (sic) growing, and defeat the Taliban without troops, when we know they terrorize the citizens, and have no qualms about killing people?"

There's something sadly familiar here, an echo of the old rationale for invading -- and then sending more troops to -- Iraq. The assumption is that the mission is an inherently noble one: that we are there to "help" the Afghan people. On the show, Maddow short-handedly characterized the mission as many Americans might: one that will help Afghanistan become a "normal" country. But -- shelving the discussion of what "normal" is -- Afghanistan was not a quote-unquote normal country long before 9/11, and Americans weren't exactly taking to the streets demanding an invasion to take out the Taliban then. For all the self-congratulatory rhetoric about the original defeat of the Taliban, the fleeting victory by U.S.-led forces did little to achieve real change for Afghan people.

Those who support sending troops into Afghanistan either understand that the original invasion was a revenge attack for 9/11 -- and consider the mission justified -- or else truly believe that U.S.-led occupying forces have a chance of stabilizing a country that has been ravaged by war and occupation for decades while also rooting out the U.S.-hating terrorists who reside there. Barack Obama, we are to believe, falls into the latter camp. He has promised to withdraw troops from Iraq to send tens of thousands more to Afghanistan. In his New York Times op-ed, "My Plan for Iraq," he wrote, "We need more troops, more helicopters, better intelligence-gathering and more nonmilitary assistance to accomplish the mission there," and he called the plan "a new strategy." But is this really a "new strategy"? Isn't it simply the Democrats' version of the Tough on Terror stance, dusted off in the service of the presidential election?