Vanden Heuvel beats Boot but war will continue

I find it hard to imagine that any objective person reading Katrina vanden Heuvel on the costs of the Afghanistan war and Max Boot on the need to give General Petraeus a chance today would come out in favor of continuing the war for four more years, at great cost in money and lives. Boot’s Iraq analogy is stretched to the breaking point, as Nir Rosen made clear in spades yesterday. Vanden Heuvel’s enumeration of the opportunity costs is daunting.

This does not mean that vanden Heuvel is going to win the argument.  Beyond Vice President Biden’s promise to be out of Afghanistan by 2014 “come hell or high water,” I detect no push in the Administration for accelerating withdrawal.  As vanden Heuvel herself notes, the current time line enables the President to appease both hawks (with the continuing commitment) and doves (with the promised drawdown).  Removing the Afghanistan war as a partisan issue, and a divisive one among Democrats, during the 2012 presidential campaign no doubt counts as a big plus for the Administration.

Vanden Heuvel goes wildly off track in appealing to John Kerry to put the wooden stake in the heart of the Afghanistan war, as Senator William Fulbright to the Vietnam war.  Kerry has nowhere near the prestige of Fulbright; if anything, a move against the war by Kerry would be seen as one more dovish maneuver by the anti-Vietnam war protester (don’t get the wrong impression:  I was one too).  To get the U.S. to accelerate the withdrawal from Afghanistan would require a clarion call from a Republican hawk.  Little chance of that.

Instead what we need to do is make the most of what military gains Petraeus manages over the next four years by increasing the civilian effort, establishing in at least some parts of the country enough legitimate Afghan governing authority to block reentry of Al Qaeda into communities as we withdraw, and continuing the effort to reintegrate individual Taliban and to negotiate an overall political reconciliation.

There is unlikely to be victory in Afghanistan, but there needn’t be defeat either.