“Indeed, I think we have an obligation to do that—and I also think that most of these people would agree (they should be asked).”

They have been asked, you pompous Doofus, and lots of times too. This can be determined with seconds of googling. Here (pdf), for example, was one of the first things that came up.

I actually agree with Walzer that the best you can do for a continued involvement is to stress the moral obligations that followed from the occupation of the country. But it’s typical of Walzer that he doesn’t actually look at the opinions he mentions as an aside, let alone grapple with them (they’re no doubt complex, somewhat contradictory, and difficult to untangle, as group preferences so often are).

Uggggggggggghhhhhhh.

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=314

The line that stands out is this:

“If our generals and diplomats are really trying to do everything right (stop killing civilians, work locally, disown corrupt officials, emphasize social and economic reconstruction), we should probably support them for a while.”

That part does sound like Vietnam.

I don’t find that the Vietnam analogy gets me all that far, to be honest. I think Afghans mainly want to be free of the horrors of war. Beyond that, the country is fragmented into a whole lot of parts with very different priorities. It seems to me that trying to get a handle on Pashtun ambitions and grievances is a good place to start though, and I wish that more commentators did that. In any case, I don’t think the problem is that the U.S. is bucking the inevitable and very united tide of popular opinion, as it was in Vietnam.

I’m also not sure Afghanistan is all that strategically significant. Yglesias made the point not too long ago that you could draw the conclusion that Afghanistan is the graveyard of Empires, since Britain and Russia both had so much trouble there. But you could equally draw the conclusion that both superpowers eventually withdrew from Afghanistan because it wasn’t all that significant strategically. (The USSR waited to long, and got bled dry, but was bound to collapse anyway. They never needed to invade in the first place, and once there, the only reason for staying was saving face. Great Britain did just fine by settling for control of what was Northern India.)

The goal simply can’t be to deny radical plotters a sanctuary. There are tons of countries, including Germany, France, Canada and the U.S., and not just Sudan, Somalia, parts of Pakistan, etc., that provide decent places to plot something nefarious.

If this were about neocolonialism (in the sense of territorial acquisition), then I could at least see how current policies might conceivably benefit the U.S. But current policy seems to have more to do with inertia, face-saving, and lack of imagination than what the U.S. has to gain in the region.

To be fair(er), withdrawing is a seriously tricky problem. What if things get worse? How much blame will be laid at the feet of the U.S.? Spending 10 years in a country and then just up and leaving without any improvement at all just plain looks bad. But how do you accomplish that? What does improvement look like? Why has there been so little so far? What will be different this time?

If you can bring yourself to read a bit about this, Steve, I highly recommend Rashid’s book “Descent into Chaos.”

So I must ask you, as someone who has been paying more attention than I have: is Afghanistan another Vietnam, in the sense of a country that a) really very much wants its independence, b) has been fighting off foreign conquerors for a century, and c) has had the misfortune to be strategically significant?

I guess what I’m asking is: have the government and media been diagnosing Afghanistan as something related to terrorism, when in fact it’s just more colonialism of the sort that we’ve seen over and over again for a century and more?