The unending war in Afghanistan — VOICES for REASON

Today the war in Afghanistan reaches its eight-year mark. To put that into perspective, by now a child born on the day the war began would probably be starting his third year of elementary school. Or to put it in a wider context, only the American Revolution (which lasted about 8 years 4 months) and the Vietnam War (8 years 6 months) lasted longer. U.S. involvement in World War II was over in just under four years. The NYT has a chart that illustrates these data in graphic terms. The Afghanistan debacle is on track to drag on longer than any of these. (I disagree with the compilers of this chart that the Iraq war is actually over; the recent bombings around that country suggest otherwise.)

Recall what many people agreed should be our (minimum) objective in Afghanistan eight years ago: the rooting out of the Taliban and its Islamist allies. Today a common view holds that we must resign ourselves to a world in which the Islamist menace remains a fixture of our lives — a threat we might mitigate, but never eliminate. Witness the suggestions by mainstream luminaries in foreign policy that we negotiate some sort of settlement with the Taliban, paying them to put down their arms, at least while we keep doling out cash.

That is not the punchline to a grim joke; it is what some consider to be our best option. The fact that this is taken seriously is a measure of how Americans have been demoralized by the failure of Washington to accomplish even the limited objective of eliminating the Taliban-Al Qaeda forces (to say nothing of dealing with the graver threat from Iran).

image: Flickr/tollaksen