Please leave discussion of the Afghanistan/Pakistan situation to those in the reality-based community.
Progressives have been tearing each other apart since Obama's speech announcing the escalation in Afghanistan. Most objectors to the policy have excellent reasons for their opposition: Dallasdoc, Booman and Cenk Uygur have provided exemplary, well-reasoned and intelligent articulations of the progressive viewpoint contrary to the President's policies. I myself share many of those same reservations, particularly regarding the legitimacy of the current government of Afghanistan. It is clear that no escalation of Western power in Afghanistan will work without a regime that can gain the trust of the Afghan people.
But there are many others on the left, including many here at DailyKos, who do not approach the subject from a reasoned perspective, but rather from a rigidly ideological standpoint. I will not name names, but they have been increasingly prominent as discussions have shifted to foreign policy.
These are the individuals who quietly or not-so-quietly opposed going into Afghanistan in 2001. They are the individuals who believe that the bigoted, misogynistic. violent Christianist conservative theocrats are just a few steps away from instituting a fascist regime in America, but who curiously also believe that bigoted, misogynistic, violent Islamist conservative theocrats will simply lay down their arms and walk away if all American troops abandon the Middle East tomorrow, or if Israel withdraws to its 1967 borders, or both.
These individuals are isolationists who read The Shock Doctrine, and believe the answer lies in disbanding the IMF and scrapping the U.S. military, instead of making those institutions forces for good rather than tools of corporate power and crusading bloodlust.
These individuals believe that terrorist extremists are simply asymmetrical warriors defending themselves against prior U.S. aggression; that the attacks in Madrid, London, Bali and elsewhere were nothing more than collateral damage from American and British imperial overreach; that if we simply "leave them alone, they'll leave us alone."
These individuals believe that fanatical governments across the Middle East really do care about the plight of the Palestinian people, and that if Israel ceased to exist tomorrow, these same governments would not find a different excuse to vent the anger of their oppressed people outward against the West.
These individuals do not believe that problems a world away can affect us here at home. Leaving terrorism aside, the fact that a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan would levy relentless assaults on Pakistan until the Pakistani government fell under their control is of no concern to them to be weighed in the balance for them. That a united Sunni Af/Pak Taliban-controlled nuclear regime would threaten nuclear conflagration with both India and Shi'ite Iran is seen as dubious or irrelevant.
The most irrational of these individuals refuse to even acknowledge Al-Qaeda and Islamic extremism as the source of the 9/11 attacks, preferring to believe instead in wild conspiracy theories.
In this context, a good measure of a person's credibility on the subject of Afghanistan policy in 2009 is that person's stance on Afghanistan in 2001. Those who supported the endeavor in 2001 but oppose it now have changed their minds based on factual data and a cold, reality-based look at the available evidence.
But those who opposed being in Afghanistan from the start come from as ideologically purist a position as any neoconservative or isolationist paleoconservative. And we would do well as a community to give these individuals the same credibility as we do Pat Buchanan, Bill Kristol or Thomas Friedman.