However long it takes, the Taliban must be crushed

Our current policy chaos over Afghanistan is compelling evidence that counter-terrorism’s objectives are too limited to keep Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal in safe hands, and its resources too inadequate to destroy the Taliban. On the other hand, counterinsurgency, at least under Obama, commits the United States to a good-works, community-development program that will almost inevitably fail, invariably lose popular support (as is now happening), and which is unnecessary to achieve either critical goal. Achieving U.S. strategic objectives cannot be based on Afghan performance, but only on our own…

Even if Kabul could improve overall Afghan political or economic life, it wouldn’t defeat the Taliban or Al Qaeda. Religious fanatics, and their grievances, do not arise from poverty or deprivation. Accordingly, their fanaticism is not susceptible to remedies based on economic determinism, whether of the crude Marxist variety or its community-organizer cousin. Their motives and hatreds will not disappear with prosperity or free elections. In any event, no one alive now may live long enough to see either one happen.

Instead, we require a sustained military presence in Afghanistan devoted to the grim, relentless crushing of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, coupled with substantially enhanced Pakistani military pressure there. This means protracted military action, not social services, which Team Obama is thoroughly unwilling to endorse. It turns out, entirely predictably, that Afghanistan was not “the good war” after all.