There wasn't much Afghanistan in Obama's Afghanistan speech

There wasn’t, for instance, all that much in the speech about the Taliban. Obama never spoke about their human-rights abuses, which is the kind of thing you do when you want to emotionally invest Americans in the war. He never really tied the Taliban to al Qaeda. He said the U.S. would support a political reconciliation with the Taliban as long as they supported the Afghan constitution, but he never spelled out what that means, for instance, in terms of women’s rights. And since it’s a safe bet that not many Americans have recently read the Afghan constitution, he pretty much left himself free to accept any deal that Afghanistan’s warlords cook up. If you’d come down from Mars, you’d understand why America was withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, but you wouldn’t understand why Obama sent more there in the first place. If he ever believed that American security really depends on what happens to the Taliban, he didn’t show it tonight.