The American Debate: Why we have to leave . . . unless it's better to stay

My head hurts. At first I thought it was a sinus thing, or perhaps the start of a head cold. But it's actually the pain of thinking about Afghanistan.

After much deliberation, I have finally come up with a rock-solid stance that I can support 100 percent:

It's nuts for us to stay, and it's nuts for us to go. It's nuts for us to send more troops, and it's nuts for us to phase them out.

Granted, I have now violated the first rule of contemporary punditry, which requires that, in all circumstances, we shall declare ourselves inflexibly pro or con. Guilty as charged. But I invite you to ponder Afghanistan, to weigh the factual against the counterfactual, and see how it feels.

I'd bet that President Obama's team is already raiding the medicine cabinet. As a domestic political headache, Afghanistan has the potential to be far worse than the current flap over health-care reform.

For instance, consider what could happen if we stay - if, as expected, Obama says yes to the U.S. military's reportedly imminent request for more troops, perhaps by upping the current 68,000 to roughly 100,000. The Afghan people might begin to view us as occupiers. The extremists could exploit that as a propaganda tool, stoking anti-Western sentiment in neighboring Pakistan - and that doesn't seem like an attractive scenario, given the fact that Pakistan has nukes.

But think about what might happen if we go. The jihadists in Pakistan could exploit our pullout as a propaganda opportunity to paint us as weak. They'd likely feel emboldened to wreak more havoc - and that doesn't seem like an attractive scenario, given the fact that Pakistan has nukes.

So maybe we should stay, and indeed double down on our presence. But the problem is that we're risking soldiers' lives to shore up a rampantly corrupt, legitimacy-challenged regime that may well have stolen the August election. President Hamid Karzai's running mate is an accused drug dealer, for Pete's sake. We're launching a nation-building project in a tribal backwater that has confounded empires for centuries; in terms of civic infrastructure, Afghanistan makes Iraq look like a model democracy designed by the League of Women Voters.

So maybe we should go. Phase out the troop presence, position ourselves offshore, and simply hit the bad guys with cruise missiles and drones. After all, why commit to a ground war in Afghanistan when al-Qaeda can simply ensconce itself elsewhere - in places such as Somalia? But if we scale back in Afghanistan, we undercut NATO (which also has troops on the ground), and if we undercut NATO, the vacuum could be filled by Russia or China.

And if Obama pulls back, he would undercut his own credibility. After all, he campaigned last year on the premise that Afghanistan was the just war, and earlier this summer he called it a "war of necessity." The problem is that, the longer he persists, the more he risks alienating his core supporters; according to a new CNN poll, 74 percent of Democrats (as well as 57 percent of independents) are now opposed to the war. Apparently they would prefer that Obama pull a flip-flop.

But if Obama did that, most Republicans would roast him. The irony is that right now, at least with respect to Afghanistan, they happen to be his biggest fans. Conservative pundit-provocateur William Kristol, of all people, is actually cheering for Obama to broaden the war effort, and he's assailing all the doves as defeatists.

Bill Kristol has Obama's back? That should tell you plenty about the president's political woes. His prime allies on Afghanistan are basically the same people who yearn to strangle his presidency in year one. As evidenced lately, Obama cannot even talk to America's students about the importance of school without some Republicans wailing about "socialist indoctrination." I assume they'll start questioning Obama's war resolve and success metrics (in other words, his commander in chief credentials) during the run-up to the 2012 campaign.

But forget the GOP political factor; there are sound moral reasons for staying in Afghanistan. Have we not pledged to defend the Afghan people whom we previously abandoned? Go rent the movie Charlie Wilson's War; after we surreptitiously helped the locals defeat the Soviet army during the '80s, we just walked away. And that simply made it easier for the bad guys to take up residence.

And now we want to stop the bad guys from doing it again. But hang on: Are we talking about five years, 10 years, or 20? By what measure can we guarantee that the country will be permanently inhospitable to al-Qaeda? Is that our definition of "victory," and how can we ever know whether it has been achieved? Richard Holbrooke, the president's envoy to Afghanistan, addressed those kinds of questions last month, and here's what he came up with:

"The specific goal of the United States is really hard for me to address in specific terms. But I would say this about defining success in Afghanistan. . . . We'll know it when we see it."

It's not very comforting to hear Holbrooke conjure, as a victory metric, the U.S. Supreme Court's vague criterion for defining obscenity. What's next, Gen. William Westmoreland's Vietnam incantation about "light at the end of the tunnel"?

No wonder my head hurts. It's time to take an Advil, kick back on the holiday, play my iPod - but wait, there's no escape. Here comes a classic tune by the Clash:

If I go, there will be trouble

And if I stay, it will be double

So you gotta let me know,

Should I stay or should I go?

Dick Polman: Should we stay or should we go? C3.EndText