Dan Rather: What Obama Doesn't Know About Afghanistan

There’s been a lot of news concerning Afghanistan since President Obama took office, from the president’s decision to increase the U.S. force there by 17,000, to reports he is considering an outreach to moderate elements of the Taliban and being advised to carry out missile strikes in and around the Pakistan city of Quetta. Now there is word that President Obama will, within days, announce a new set of diplomatic and military tactics for the war he promised to put front and center.

As the president contemplates his options in Afghanistan, let us hope he realizes that the first thing to know about that country is that there are no experts. History, from centuries past up to recent experience, shows that those who claim the most knowledge and voice the strongest opinions about Afghanistan often know the least.

This pattern of frequently-in-error-but-never-in-doubt about one of the more complex places on earth extends, unfortunately, to a lot of the people currently claiming expertise and offering the president advice. They are well-intentioned but have little real knowledge—much less wisdom—about Afghanistan. So it has been through the ages, especially among Westerners.

Your reporter has been in Afghanistan a fair amount over the past 29 years, beginning in 1980 just after the Soviets invaded and continuing through recent years. Perhaps the biggest lesson of these journalistic efforts has been: Whatever you think you know about Afghanistan is in direct inverse proportion to how often you have been there. The more you go there, the more you know how much you don’t know.

With this and history’s lessons in mind, the following thoughts are offered, for whatever they may be worth:

1.In pursuing this war, the U.S. needs to go big and go long or go home. To succeed within the parameters we have laid out for ourselves in Afghanistan will take a much longer military commitment and the spending of a lot more money over greater time than most people have been led to believe. Consider, for example, a report in the New York Times that even members of President Obama’s national-security team were taken aback by the projected cost of expanding the Afghan army....