From the start, America’s huge investment in Afghanistan has been a mistake. It was always necessary, not to mention just plain right, to go after Osama bin Laden and kill every last member of al-Qaeda. That job has mostly been done. But the rest — the routing of the Taliban and the building of a democratic state — is beyond America’s reach. The troops — most of them — should come home.
What a shock. But don't think he simply wants to run away! Oh no! There are bigger threats than Afghanistan that Afghanistan distracts us from confronting:
Staying in Afghanistan will only buttress the argument of the New Isolationists. This is the larger danger. America remains the sole nation capable of playing the role of adult. The world needs us. The world will soon need us even more. China, India, Pakistan, Japan and the two Koreas are about as compatible as the Real Housewives of New York. They all either have or are capable of developing nuclear weapons. Iran is on its way. Its program could cause the Israelis to attack, and it might also prompt Saudi Arabia and maybe Egypt to go nuclear. Jordan could implode, and Iraq could come apart. Have I mentioned cyber-warfare? That’s the one that gives military planners insomnia.
Afghanistan is an odd, irrelevant place to get bogged down. We can kill terrorists but not the culture that produces them. The corruption is staggering, our lack of understanding is humbling and our war aims are incoherent. It’s time to say goodbye and save our powder for what really matters — the demons of sleepless nights to come.
This is just sad. At least the people opposed to the Iraq War pointed to North Korea during the pre-war debates as a bigger threat. And after the insurgencies started, they pointed to Afghanistan as the place we should be fighting. Cohen, unable to pick a single threat we really must address, adopts a shotgun approach and says that virtually the entire world is a greater threat than the Afghanistan campaign.
It was easy to predict that Afghanistan would lose its status as the "good war."
It was easy because while the left is willing to bomb enemies (indeed, if they don't shoot back in a sustained manner it doesn't even count as war!), it is unwilling to defeat them. When liberals are faced with an actual war, they can always think of a bigger threat that we should be vigilantly confronting, instead.
