Afghanistan matters

I find it hard to give full credit to what David Ignatius perceives as “positive signs” in Afghanistan.  There have been too many false reports in the past.  But at the same time I find it hard to credit Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s pessimism and the notion, which she shares with Ignatius, that Osama bin Laden’s death somehow changes the picture dramatically:

What the Senator and the columnist share, along with most of the speakers at the CAP event, is a desire to escape Afghanistan as quickly and as harmlessly as possible.

I understand the impulse. It has already been a long and expensive slog. But what we leave behind in Afghanistan matters.

It matters not only because Afghanistan once harbored Al Qaeda, but also because the very people who today have safe haven in Pakistan might some day have safe haven in Afghanistan, from which they would be attacking a fragile nuclear weapons state. We can rely on the Northern Alliance forces that resisted the Taliban in the past to continue to do so, but they had no luck in retaking territory from the Taliban until the Americans weighed in on their side.

So Afghanistan matters because Pakistan matters. That should not however be a formula for eternal commitment of 100,000 American troops. It does mean that we should be using the time between now and the end of 2014, when President Obama has promised to turn over security entirely to the Afghans, to make a serious effort to enable the Afghan state. In state-building terms, 2014 is tomorrow, so I don’t really expect enormous progress.

But there will be no progress at all if we spend the next three years quarreling among ourselves about whether to stay that long or not. We should debate, yes, and set some goals that are realistic. But then we need to get on with serious business.