HERE'S A RULE we wish our leaders would follow when committing U.S. troops - or more troops - to fight abroad:
Would the American people support the move if there were a military draft - if they or their loved ones actually had to fight it, instead of some other mothers' children in the all-volunteer military?
If the rule had been followed before the United States invaded Afghanistan after 9/11, the answer might well have been yes.
But eight years later, even without a draft, a near-majority have strong doubts about U.S. presence there. So it's encouraging that President Obama is taking more time to do a strategic review before deciding whether to commit 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan. (This is, of course, what Gen. Stanley McChrystal said he wanted in a memo leaked to the press last month.)
For those of you scoring the game at home, here are some of the major issues involved:
The case for escalation is simple: Without American forces protecting the Afghanistan government, the country could again become a "safe haven" for al Qaeda to launch terrorist attacks.
On the other side: The Aug. 20 presidential election was fraudulent. It was unclear yesterday whether Afghanistan's president, Harmid Karzai, would accept the findings of an international audit that found that 28 percent of the votes he got in the election were invalid. The result takes Karzai's vote total under 50 percent and the country's constitution requires a runoff with the next highest vote-getter (or perhaps a power-sharing arrangement.) The results of the audit were not unexpected: Strong evidence of fraud by the deeply unpopular Karzai emerged soon after the election. How can the United States prop up a leader shown to be illegitimate? Conventional assumptions won't work. In an open letter to Obama in the Nation magazine, William R. Polk, a 50-year foreign-policy veteran, calls Afghanistan "a rocky hill sliced by gullies and covered by 20,000 Ping-Pong balls." The balls represent autonomous village-states that were politically and economically divided, but joined together by their religion. In 10 years of war there, the Soviet Union "crushed many Ping-Pong balls" but not enough to win the war. U.S. and NATO forces using conventional approaches to warfare are unlikely to do better, Polk says.
The Taliban is not al Qaeda. Al Qaeda is the international organization, led by Osama bin Laden, that plans and carries out terrorist attacks around the world. The Taliban, while it enforces an extreme form of Islam, is interested only in Afghanistan. The Taliban did provide a haven for al Qaeda, but U.S. officials admit that almost all members of al Qaeda have left the country and are now in Pakistan. The Taliban is in conflict with the savage warlords who control much of the countryside. Given the choice, some Afghanis would choose the Taliban over the warlords.
Women in Afghanistan are no better off now than they were under the Taliban. The Taliban's extreme form of Islam did indeed oppress women, but Karzai secretly signed a law that allows Afghan men to starve their wives if they refuse to have sex when the husbands want it, essentially condoning spousal rape. Acid attacks against teachers and girls attempting to go to school are increasing. And now, Afghan women are living in a war zone.
The war is costing us trillions. Like $3.6 billion a month, and the meter keeps running. That would buy an awful lot of health-care reform.
Before the current "review," Obama called Afghanistan a "war of necessity." He might consider that the nation has other "necessities" - ones that don't require the sacrifice of thousands of American and Afghan lives.