Read Michael Cohen’s piece on this. You can see its antecedents in an exchange we had a couple weeks ago. So not to belabor the point, but if Michael wants to know why there isn’t more liberal outrage over Afghanistan — and by which he means more liberal institutional outrage, I gather — here are some suggestions that he doesn’t really get into. (I am not going to contest the premise that there has been liberal “silence” on Afghanistan, since what Michael basically means is that there’s too little liberal outrage around it, and that’s a subjective judgment. Draw your own conclusions, your mileage may vary, etc.)

1. The international legitimacy of the Afghanistan war, provoked by al-Qaeda’s attack on the United States and officially sanctioned by the United Nations and waged by NATO. This ain’t the Iraq war, in other words, so while the wisdom of the strategy may be questionable, the driver of outrage present in much of the Iraq debate doesn’t apply.

2. From a top-line perspective, there’s a lot of other agenda items closer to the liberal project that have clogged the document, be they the economic recovery or health care reform or climate or civil liberties, etc.

3. I can’t really prove this in any rigorous way, but my suspicion is that the media oxygen surrounding Iraq from 2003 to 2008 has led the public to largely perceive of the Afghanistan war as in some sense re-starting in late 2008-early 2009. Rethink Afghanistan recently did a push to fight against that erroneous perception. But their efforts speak to a vague sense in which a war in Year Nine somehow doesn’t feel as long or as stalemated as it actually is. But I fully concede that I haven’t proven my contention.

4. July 2011. Despite the Obama administration’s formulation of July 2011 as the beginning of a conditions-based transference of security responsibility to the Afghans, there is no shortage of ambiguity about what July 2011 will mean in practice, either in the U.S. or in the region. At a panel at CNAS’s annual conference yesterday, Paul Pillar argued to make “meaningful” troop withdrawals starting on that date, while Ryan Crocker, Richard Fontaine, David Barno and Ashley Tellis took it for granted that the troop reductions would be superficial. Still, the fact that there’s a date out there that signals some sort of reduction in military burden probably helps lower the temperature of public discourse. (Although I wonder how much the low-information voter even knows about July 2011.)

5. The lack of a political fight over Afghanistan. Republicans have either backed the strategy or acquiesced to it. The absence of partisan bickering means the more-ubiquitous media outlets don’t treat Afghanistan as a contentious issue. (Yes, this is a structural failure of contemporary journalism.) From the liberal perspective, it would be a tendentious to ignore that liberals are just going to be less likely to get into a heated rage over a president from the Democratic Party. That’s neither a defense nor an accusation that liberals are intellectually dishonest people, just a recognition that human beings have a natural tendency to be harder on the Other Fellow than One of Us. (FDL and Glenn Greenwald try very hard to push back against that tendency.)

I could go on, but I get the impression that Michael is less interested in the descriptive question than he is in making the normative case that liberals ought to break with the Obama administration over Afghanistan. And that would be the piece I’d prefer to read, with an alternative Afghanistan strategy laid out. My belief, as everyone here knows, is that a counterinsurgency-based strategy is the least-bad approach on offer to secure U.S. interests in Afghanistan against al-Qaeda and its affiliates. But I’m open to alternatives that make more sense.

See also Tim Fernholz and Andrew Exum. Brian Katulis snarks at Exum on Twitter but I’m not honestly sure why.