Hey there, sports fans. My name is Karaka Pend; I blog at Permissble Arms and will round out Spencer’s panel o’ guestbloggers. Getting a bit of a late start–curse you, Comcast internet!–but better belated than not at all.

David Sanger, in Sunday’s NYT, explores what went wrong in Afghanistan. Now that we’re nine years in, perhaps we have enough perspective to play the what-if game. Sanger’s points ring true, but more interestingly, it shapes the story even as the story goes on.

The commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, ultimately won the argument for a major surge in Iraq; a much smaller force was sent to Afghanistan, mostly to show that the country had not been forgotten. There were not enough troops for simultaneous surges.

Would a bigger force have beaten back the Taliban? Maybe. But it is just as likely that the Taliban would have disappeared over the porous border into Pakistan, where they knew that American forces could not follow them. In fact, it was during this time that the Pakistanis truly opened the sanctuary, sometimes providing the Taliban with arms and support. Mr. Bush never talked about that in public (though he fumed in private), figuring that publicly splitting with a nuclear-armed Pakistan was inviting a backlash.

It’s like he’s writing from 2015, post-”withdrawal”, instead of barely two years post fact. I don’t even disagree with the points that he makes, identifying four roads taken that set the path of this war. But I do find it a little, hm, impractical to make conclusions by portraying counterfactuals when the conflict has really escalated eight months ago. We’re pretty far from the end, but the way I read Sanger, the end is nigh.