I think many anti-war progressives (contra Democrats) would have been perfectly okay with allowing Bush to declare victory at Arbitrary Point W between 2004 and 2007 if it had involved concrete steps toward withdrawal, regardless of what benchmarks had been met. Just sayin’.

Rashid is fine as far as it goes, but a few years ago he was calling the Bonn Conference—which created the “maximalist” state he now rails against—as a viable blueprint and upbraided the International Community for not supporting the Afghan State more fully.

So they’re kind of damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

Also, claiming that under Shah or Daoud nobody starved is a flat out lie. Pashtuns didn’t starve in any great numbers (the only people in Afghanistan Rashid regularly sympathizes with), but the Hazarajat suffered several famines.

Spencer, don’t I recall you on an email list agreeing back in 2007 that it wasn’t the skeptics job to do the administration’s detailed planning for it? Yet now you’re apparently advancing a variant on Bush’s infamous 2007 argument for staying the course that “To oppose everything while proposing nothing is irresponsible.”

The Pentagon and White House still haven’t come up with their own benchmarks for success in Af/Pak and we’ve been waiting since March 9th, so calling an analyst out for not doing what massives of staffers and national leadership haven’t done is a bit cold – and now we have the mission creep explicitly stated by Gen. Karl Eikenberry, US ambassador to Afghanistan.

“One of our primary objectives is consolidation of a government and society that are stable, secure and confident enough to be an effective partner of the U.S.”

Are you happy with that mission? Are you happy that we were told something entirely different back in March and have gotten there by increments that stifled real debate about whether it was a good idea? Would you like to take a guess at how long it will take, if it’s attainable at all?

Regards, Steve

I think the real problem with ALL these discussions about the changes that can be induced or imposed upon the state of Afghanistan and/or what a future Afghanistan might look like if we can only accomplish X,Y and Z is that they are outright category errors. They all proceed from the premise that profound and unprecedented changes to the Afghan society, culture and government can be created with the appropriate application of security, economic assistance, training and education and diplomatic support.

But what is the basis for believing thus? Is it unrealistically pessimistic to expect Afghanistan in 2020 to look essentially like Afghanistan of 2010, 2000 or 1990? There is no underlying structure to build on, no economy to develop, no infrastructure to leverage, no professional class (outside of warlords) to draw from and nothing that constitutes national consensus or even unity.

This is why American goals beyond any identifiable national security imperative are unrealistic. There’s no realistic path to a different kind of government, a different kind of society or a different kind of nation. And it’s pretty hard for anybody to tell a believable story that has that kind of happy ending. You almost get the sense that the Obama administration is hoping people will think in terms of these basic changes without them actually proposing specifically to bring them about.

What? I wrote on Friday:

I don’t buy the equivalency that critics of a strategy have an equal obligation to come up with a fully-formed alternative to every proposal. The deck should be weighted against starting and escalating wars. (Afghanistan is the classic example of a justified war, arising after a devastating, intolerable and unjust attack on the U.S.) If the arguments for escalation can withstand that extra weight, then they ought to be considered and adopted. They shouldn’t be allowed to skate by because of holes — real or hypothetical — in the perspective of their interlocutors, nor because there isn’t a cohesive alternative that can account for every contingency.

But if you think that means that we also shouldn’t ask critical questions of the critics, then that says more about your state of thinking than it does my alleged hypocrisy. Or am I supposed to pretend that all antiwar arguments are glorious?

I figured addressing that “no one starved” point was fruitless — figured he didn’t mean that literally, and in any case you and others are better equipped to address the history than I am. The consistent point in Rashid’s work is that Afghanistan receives less attention from Washington than it deserves, but the paths he takes to make that point is indeed, as you write, rather divergent…

I’m working on an Afghanistan-development piece that I hope will address these points.

Spencer, I didn’t see your Friday piece, having been offline for a house move then and still catching up on my regular reading now. Fair enough and I apologise for the lapse, but don’t put words in my mouth – I never accused you of outright hypocrisy. What I wrote was that it was a bit cold to be calling out an analyst for a lack of benchmarks when the combined might of WH and Pentagon haven’t yet managed to come up with their own.

I know you well enough to know you write with the best of intent. I respect you and consider you a friend who happens to disagree on this one issue. As for the strawman about pretending all anti-war arguments are glorious, you know my thinking well enough to know that’s a non-starter too.

So that’s the first graph of my comment – any response on the latter graphs about the creeping transformation of the mission? I know you’ve worried about that in past posts and hoped for a reaction to Eikenberry’s explicit statement of that creep. This post at VetVoice would seem to be apposite.

Regards, Steve