Back when I worked at a magazine I don’t work for anymore, I attended an off-the-record luncheon with Joe Lieberman, in which he made his case to the magazine’s staff about why he should be president. I don’t honestly know what my obligations are at this point as far as respecting the ground rules. But suffice it to say it was a train wreck. I left the session wondering why people pretended that Lieberman was some kind of wise man, when he was more like a guy who had read a set of policy briefings many years ago and decided that he had learned all he needed to learn and never needed to adjust his perspective. As with Ja Rule singing that same goddamn “Where would I be without you” song in different forms.

I got the same feeling reading this transcript:

DAVID GREGORY: Senator Lieberman– (UNINTEL) is the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee supports General McChrystal’s– policy of– of additional forces. He said this about the end game. The exit strategy. When the area has been stabilized, then it’s time to go home. Is that the obligation for the United States? That Afghanistan must be stabilized before we leave?

SENATOR LIEBERMAN: Yeah, that’s our goal. And– and it’s our goal– for good reason. As Senator Durbin just said, (CLEARS THROAT) we were attacked on 9/11 from Afghanistan. (CLEARS THROAT) If we leave Afghanistan with less than success, as– as a country that can govern itself and protect itself, it’s gonna have a terrible destabilizing effect on the rest of the region.

So, I don’t like it when people say we have no long term interest in Afghanistan. Or we’re lookin’ for an exit strategy. We– we– we have– we don’t want to have a long term interest in having our military there long term. But we have real long term interest in– this place being stabilized. And–

It should be clear that these are a set of bullet points strung together, with no narrative or argumentative sinew connecting them. I won’t front. If we had to divide the debate into For and Against the Afghanistan war, Lieberman and I are going to be standing on the same side of the room, an unfortunate fact that I’m not happy about. But even if we’re going to entertain the fiction that Lieberman is actually motivated by more than pique, the guy isn’t actually making a case to anyone on television who might be wavering or persuadable.

That case sound look more like: the surest way we can actually bring the broader Afghanistan-Pakistan theater of war to a conclusion that satisfies U.S. interests against the people who attacked us on 9/11 is to address the reasons in Afghanistan why the insurgency takes root. Because that rootedness provides what’s known as ‘strategic depth’ for al-Qaeda, even though al-Qaeda are pretty much absent from Afghanistan: material support, money, breathing room, dudes to potentially do stuff against us and our allies; I’m not saying Afghan villagers are going to fly planes into the Sears Tower, but you get the idea. Now, if we pay attention to why Afghans give active or passive support for the insurgency, it’s not because they like the Taliban; they hate it. But the Taliban provides better methods of adjudicating disputes and a kind of security-through-fear. If we cut through those methods, militarily and economically and governance-wise, and address those root causes, then we constrict the breathing room for al-Qaeda massively, and along with the Pakistanis staying in Waziristan, that tightens the noose further. And then we keep the pressure on in Waziristan and al-Qaeda Senior Leadership — with its allies in the Haqqani network, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, and the Mehsud Tribe-led Pakistani Taliban — is fucked. We constrict and contain them, harass them militarily when we can, and they’re done in a couple of years, because the Muslims they seek to exploit and radicalize will see their impotence. We help build up the Pakistani economy and rule of law and the Afghan security forces, and then we’re done. Done! And “Done” here means “we have a close and long term diplomatic and economic relationship with Afghanistan and Pakistan but our troops come home” just to make sure that neither country backslides. But I mean it — this isn’t and shouldn’t be a “Forever War.” We can end it, and end it on our terms. I think this is in our interests. What do you think?

But that would require Lieberman to, you know, think this stuff through, and that’s haaaaaaaaaard.