The Best and the Brightest

As President Obama reviews his options for continued American involvement in Aghanistan, I've been rereading David Halberstam's 1972 survey of our descent into Vietnam, "The Best and the Brightest."

One theme prevails in reading this history now nearly forty years after it was written. Halberstam's focus on the individual decision-makers feels misplaced. For all their talents and weaknesses, these men were not in control of events, let alone equal to them. They were the products of an earlier time, just as today's Administration is inevitably out of time. America's disastrous adventure in Vietnam was, by all historical measures, the inevitable product of a hugely complex political and social struggle which dwarfed the men who led us into full-scale war as surely as it dwarfed the millions of casualties which resulted.

The American political mood made it impossible for our elected leaders to find an exit strategy short of victory. The Vietnamese themselves made that victory impossible.

The lesson here for Afghanistan is quite simple.

We can be certain our Afghan adversaries will make victory impossible. Their advantages are profound. They have more at stake and, unlike us, they have nowhere else to go. We will tire of this war. We deceive ourselves and our allies to suggest otherwise. We consign thousands and thousands of as-yet unblemished bodies and minds to the meat grinder of a campaign we cannot finish. It is time to declare victory and go home.

Sadly, of course, we won't.

The Obama Administration has a second term to think about. Their political opponents will criticize whatever the Administration chooses to do, but most certainly any strategy that "leaves Afghanistan to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda."

We the People dither. Afghanistan is a righteous cause for a handful of reasons: We were attacked and have a right to defend ourselves from further attacks; the Taliban viciously oppressed the Afghan people, particularly their women; having created a power vacuum, we have a moral duty to help rebuild the country; leaving short of victory emboldens our enemies and discourages our allies. All true, to some degree, and all irrelevant when one acknowledges the cost in lives and limbs against the absolute inevitablity of our eventual withdrawal without achieving any one of those goals.

Halberstam would say our fate is in the hands of those decision-makers in war council at the White House, as though the outcome were actually in the balance. I think our fate is already sealed by the short-sighted, contradictory, and ultimately naive impulses which possess our body politic and will take generations to gestate. I would love to see Barack Obama prove me wrong.