My lunch with Obama on Afghanistan

There has been much talk about how this war is Obama’s Vietnam, but the president rejected the analogy. The Vietnamese never killed 3,000 people in America, as al-Qaeda did; we aren’t fighting a nationalist movement in Afghanistan; and he isn’t making an open-ended commitment.

“To pretend that somehow this is a distant country that has nothing to do with us is just factually incorrect,” he told the columnists. I agree with him — Afghanistan is vital to U.S. security interests. But I don’t think he will convince many House Democrats…

When I asked Obama if the Taliban wouldn’t simply wait us out, he was dismissive: “This is an argument that I don’t give a lot of credence to, because if you follow the logic of this argument, then you would never leave. Right? Essentially you’d be signing on to have Afghanistan as a protectorate of the United States indefinitely.”