So George Will has noticed that Afghanistan is a backward place ill-suited to nation-building, and Nicholas Kristof thinks that war is a tricky, dirty business, and Tom Friedman is hedging his bets on yet another conflict he once supported but which now disturbs his moral equilibrium. Thus do three paladins of the right, left and center combine to erode support for a war that, if lost, would be to the United States roughly what the battle of Adrianople in 378 A.D. —you can look it up—was to the Roman Empire. Things did not go well for Western civilization for 1,100 or so years thereafter.
Overstated? I don't think so.
The simplistic case for NATO's mission in Afghanistan is that it's the country that harbored al Qaeda when the plans for 9/11 were hatched. The simplistic rebuttal is that nothing prevents al Qaeda from planning another attack from another country, if not in the Pakistan hinterland then perhaps in Somalia or Yemen—and the U.S. has no plans to physically occupy any of these places. Ergo, goes the argument, we should "offshore" our military and intelligence capabilities so we can strike at will while leaving Afghans to their own incompetent and tragic devices.
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