Bret Stephens: Is Afghanistan Worth It?
[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs.]
Even Americans who pride themselves on knowing their history have probably never heard of the Battle of Stones River. Fought over frigid ground in January 1863, the battle gave the Union control over central Tennessee and a badly needed morale boost after the disaster of Fredericksburg two weeks earlier. It also resulted in 1,700 Union and 1,300 Confederate deaths. That's nearly three times the fatalities the U.S. has endured in more than eight years of fighting in Afghanistan.
It's never easy to point out that, in the scale of American military sacrifice, Afghanistan does not figure large. But acknowledging a historical fact does nothing to belittle the cost the war has exacted on America's soldiers and their families: It merely offers some mental ballast to offset the swelling panic. What does belittle the sacrifice—both for those who have fallen and those who fight—is to suggest that the war is nothing but a misbegotten errand in a godforsaken land.
In last week's column, I argued that an American withdrawal from Afghanistan, followed by a partial or complete Taliban victory, would mean a humanitarian disaster for Afghans comparable to what happened in Southeast Asia after the Communist takeover in 1975. Averting that outcome by staying in Afghanistan is the liberal case for the war.
What about the conservative case? Let's start with the best conservative case against the war. It holds that (a) all attempts to build Afghanistan as a nation will prove as futile as all past attempts to subdue it; (b) Afghanistan is a sideshow when the focus of our efforts in the region should be Pakistan, Iran or elsewhere; (c) even a "successful" outcome in Afghanistan wouldn't be worth the toll in lives, effort and expense; (d) we've basically defeated al Qaeda already and can keep them in check through drone strikes, so why are we now taking sides in a sectarian Afghan blood feud?; and (e) if Afghans massacre each other in the wake of a U.S. withdrawal, that's their unfortunate business and further proof of proposition (a).
This analysis might be somewhat more compelling if we were having an argument about whether to invade Afghanistan in the first place, as if history were a cassette we could rewind and re-record at will. (Now there's a liberal fantasy.) We are in Afghanistan now. So the choices before us are not what we should have done in 2001, when most Americans—and almost all conservatives—demanded we take Kandahar the way Sherman took Atlanta. The question is what we do in 2010...
Read entire article at WSJ
Even Americans who pride themselves on knowing their history have probably never heard of the Battle of Stones River. Fought over frigid ground in January 1863, the battle gave the Union control over central Tennessee and a badly needed morale boost after the disaster of Fredericksburg two weeks earlier. It also resulted in 1,700 Union and 1,300 Confederate deaths. That's nearly three times the fatalities the U.S. has endured in more than eight years of fighting in Afghanistan.
It's never easy to point out that, in the scale of American military sacrifice, Afghanistan does not figure large. But acknowledging a historical fact does nothing to belittle the cost the war has exacted on America's soldiers and their families: It merely offers some mental ballast to offset the swelling panic. What does belittle the sacrifice—both for those who have fallen and those who fight—is to suggest that the war is nothing but a misbegotten errand in a godforsaken land.
In last week's column, I argued that an American withdrawal from Afghanistan, followed by a partial or complete Taliban victory, would mean a humanitarian disaster for Afghans comparable to what happened in Southeast Asia after the Communist takeover in 1975. Averting that outcome by staying in Afghanistan is the liberal case for the war.
What about the conservative case? Let's start with the best conservative case against the war. It holds that (a) all attempts to build Afghanistan as a nation will prove as futile as all past attempts to subdue it; (b) Afghanistan is a sideshow when the focus of our efforts in the region should be Pakistan, Iran or elsewhere; (c) even a "successful" outcome in Afghanistan wouldn't be worth the toll in lives, effort and expense; (d) we've basically defeated al Qaeda already and can keep them in check through drone strikes, so why are we now taking sides in a sectarian Afghan blood feud?; and (e) if Afghans massacre each other in the wake of a U.S. withdrawal, that's their unfortunate business and further proof of proposition (a).
This analysis might be somewhat more compelling if we were having an argument about whether to invade Afghanistan in the first place, as if history were a cassette we could rewind and re-record at will. (Now there's a liberal fantasy.) We are in Afghanistan now. So the choices before us are not what we should have done in 2001, when most Americans—and almost all conservatives—demanded we take Kandahar the way Sherman took Atlanta. The question is what we do in 2010...