An ad hoc group of bloggers has come together for the purpose of opposing a U.S.-led escalation in Afghanistan that is slated to double the number of American troops there.
Organized by Alex Thurston at The Seminal and Robert Greenwald's Brave New Films, the project is called Get Afghanistan Right. All this week - January 12-18 - bloggers across wwwLand, as well as writers in more traditional media, will be challenging the conventional wisdom - including the conventional wisdom of many progressives - regarding Afghanistan. As Howie Klein at Down with Tyranny puts it, we'll be doing this "in the hope of helping to remind Obama that he needs to get us out of Bush's wars, not dig us deeper into the hole."
Given the likely arc of U.S. policy in Afghanistan, we should expect that this one-week of intensive discussion about getting Afghanistan right may change but will not end on January 18.
You can read several recent pieces on the subject at Get Afghanistan Right's newly launched Web site, including Robert Drefuss's Hey Obama, Don't Let Afghanistan Be Your Quagmire, dcrowe's Afghanistan War: Unfunded and a Liability, Bob Herbert's The Afghan Quagmire, and Andrew Bacevich's Winning In Afghanistan: Victory there won't look like you think. Time to get out and give up on nation building, among others.
If you oppose the escalation, you can become part of getting Afghanistan right by signing up to receive e-mail updates. And if you blog something on the subject, you can e-mail the project's Web site and have a link to your writing posted.
Other people involved in the Get Afghanistan Right project include Tom Hayden, who has written Obama's Wars, The Nation's editor and publisher, Katrina vanden Heuvel, who has written Obama Must Get Afghanistan Right, and Ann Jones, who has written The Afghan Scam: The Untold Story of Why the U.S. Is Bound to Fail in Afghanistan.
Last week, Rachel Maddow took note of a report from the United States Institute of Peace and spoke with Steve Clemons of The Note on the growing discomfort in some quarters over Afghanistan policy:
The Future of Afghanistan, a collection of essays by 10 experts whose résumés you can read here. They are Marvin G. Weinbaum, Amin Tarzi, Barnett R. Rubin, William Maley, Nader Nadery, Jolyon Leslie, Grant Kippen, Ali A. Jalali, Haseeb Humayoon, and Sippi Azarbaijani-Moghaddam.
While these are heavily credentialed folks, USIP's record since its founding in 1984 has been criticized by many on the left for abandoning its original purpose and leaning more toward how to manage wars rather than how to build peace. That doesn't, however, make these 10 essays worthless. Combined with what others are writing, they provide some valuable background information and opinions about what's going on and what could and should go on in Afghanistan.
Already, the war in Afghanistan has been under way for seven years, which, if you exclude the Indian Wars, is longer than any sustained military action by the United States except the Revolutionary War and Vietnam. We are told by General David Petraeus and a host of other observers and participants that it will continue for many more years, perhaps a decade or more.
An opportunity now exists to avoid that possibility. U.S. strategy in the Afghan war is on the verge of a change, thanks to last November's election. Techniques of counter-insurgency so far untried or barely tried in Afghanistan will be part of the equation. But the new strategy and tactics so far announced and apparently backed by the incoming administration include a wrongheaded and perilous military escalation. This reconfigured policy, like Iraq policy in 2003, is a war without an exit plan. That's not getting Afghanistan right.