AFGHAN WIGS. Rob, I liked your piece defending the worthy invasion of Afghanistan. If I can make one criticism: early in the piece you ask, "If we�ve come to the conclusion now that the Iraq invasion was a mistake, then how do we evaluate the disaster on the other side of Iran?" I don't see how a reevaluation of Afghanistan follows from the disaster in Iraq, except as something of an academic exercise. For the reasons that you ably explain, these are really different wars, with really different objectives and fought for really different reasons. It's an annoying trope of Christopher Hitchens's, among others, to intimate that calls for withdrawal from Iraq are merely one symptom of a general bug-out tendency on the left, rather than a discrete analysis of Iraq qua Iraq. I know that's not what you're up to, but it's worth keeping the distinctions in mind. Second -- and at the risk of undermining my point -- the question we need to be asking ourselves about Afghanistan is: what now? That is, evaluating Afghanistan qua Afghanistan, we're certainly not seeing much in the way of clarity from the Bush administration on what the objectives are, and if ever there's a recipe for an open-ended military deployment, there it is. Not that that's a bad thing -- with Pakistan opting to give up fighting al-Qaeda, and a resurgent Taliban, there's quite a lot of opportunity for al-Q to reestablish operations in their lost Afghan home, which readers of Peter Bergen's books know has a seriously romantic mystique for them. That's the sort of situation where we should be keeping U.S. forces around -- but we should be, you know, debating this, rather than watching it happen through drift.
--Spencer Ackerman
