The lesser evil

By urging this, I’m reversing a promise I made years ago after the Vietnam War. That war was the central professional experience of my life. I worked in the Senate and the Pentagon for the early years of the war. I supported the war. When it was done, when I looked back at it and wrote a book about it, I concluded that Presidents Kennedy and Johnson steered a middle way because they felt they couldn’t win and couldn’t get out. Thus, they went step by step, deeper and deeper, doing just enough not to lose, pursuing a horribly costly war without any real prospect of a good outcome, simply hoping for something to turn up. I vowed I wouldn’t be a party to that kind of thinking again. I promised myself that when faced with a situation drowning in contradictions and highly contestable American interests, I would argue either to win or to withdraw.

And here I am staring at Afghanistan and Pakistan. And I can’t keep my promise. We can’t just walk away from Afghanistan. That would weaken our efforts in the far more important battle in Pakistan to keep nukes out of the hands of extremists. And it would dishonor the sacrifices made thus far. We can’t win, either. By anyone’s reckoning, that would take five to 10 years under the best of assumptions. Those who say the United States can pacify and rebuild Afghanistan in that time frame (or any time, for that matter) may be kidding themselves, but they’re certainly conning others. And the costs of “winning” would be prohibitive: perhaps $2 trillion, well beyond American interests and needs. Nor can we stay where we are and pretend we can train thousands more in the Afghan army and police force in the next two years. That pretense would put American troops already there at greater risk; the result would be defeat in the end, in any event.