In anticipation of Barack Obama’s speech on Afghanistan Wednesday
evening, I spent some time reading about the history of American involvement in that forlorn country over the past 30 years, re-familiarizing myself with long-forgotten names and details. It’s a history that is sad, comic, and frustrating by turns, rational only intermittently, and courageous (in the sense of far-sighted) pretty much never. More importantly, it’s a history that suggests that no matter what Obama says in this address, we’re going to be in that place doing one thing or another for the next 30 years. And not just there: We’ll be in Egypt and Libya and Syria, too. And the thing is—we need to maintain a presence in these all of these places. But in the future, we might at least try to make our presence a smart one.
