Eminent military historian and professor of international relations Andrew Bacevich notices that when it comes to American policy in Afghanistan, the emperor has no clothes:
Through the concerted use of American power, [the Bush administration] intended to transform the Greater Middle East thereby eliminating the conditions that had given rise to 9/11 and preventing its recurrence. Except in the eyes of a remnant of neoconservatives, that effort has definitively failed. The result of that failure is a strategic void: Today, the United States doesn't have a meaningful plan to deal with the threat posed by violent jihadism. As a result, the remnants of World War IV--both Iraq and Afghanistan--are strategically meaningless. They form parts of a whole that events have rendered obsolete. This is the 800-pound elephant that...proponents of global counterinsurgency want us all to avoid noticing.
Let's assume the best. Let's assume that after five to ten years of additional effort, the expenditure of several hundred billion more dollars, and the loss of at least several hundred more American lives, something like the McChrystal plan "works." What will the United States have gained? Will we have driven a stake through the heart of violent jihadism? Will we have even reduced the jihadist threat appreciably? To answer any of those questions in the affirmative, you have to believe that Afghanistan is jihad central. But it's not. We could convert Afghanistan into a Central Asian version of Disney World and violent Islamic radicalism would persist unabated in various quarters of the world... The threat is a transnational one and is not subject to elimination no matter how energetically we pursue armed nation-building campaigns in far-off places.
So why then is the US staying in Afghanistan? And why are we on the brink of committing tens of thousands more troops there?
For one reason, Bacevich says:
To what end? Given the amount of money that counterinsurgency enthusiasts are keen to spend in Afghanistan and the number of lives that will be consumed in the process, they ought to provide a very clear answer to that question. They won't, however, because to do so is to acknowledge that permanent war has become the de facto policy of the United States--even as it has become apparent that war does not provide a plausible antidote to the problems facing the United States.
To Obama's credit, he's already resisted demands from the Pentagon to devour yet more and more of the national treasure, by at least reducing the rate at which military spending will increase next year. Now he needs to resist their demands for a permanent state of war, by ordering the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan instead of escalating an impossible mission by sending more.