False premises

Gary Kamiya has an article on Salon.com that got me agitated about one of my pet peeves, the accepted wisdom amongst progressives that the US (and by extension everyone else) should withdraw from Afghanistan, that somehow this war is morally on par with Iraq. (article here)

While this article and the commenters make some good points, it ignores some important facts about the situation in Afghanistan.

First is the state of Afghanistan before the war. The bombast and propoganda of the right over the last seven years has made it difficult to retain clarity on this issue, but the fact is the Taliban were, between 1996 and 2001, the most brutal and repressive regime on the planet, and that they were allowed to rage through Afghanistan unchecked should shame us all. When Gary Kamiya and apparently almost the entire left advocate abandoning Afghanistan, they advocate leaving over 30 million people in the hands of a system of deliberate evil. At least for the sake of 15 million Afghani women, troops must remain in Afghanistan.

Second is the fact that terrorism does, in fact, offer an existential threat to democracies. There is no more compelling proof of that than the de facto repression of free speech, imprisonment and torture of the innocent sometimes unto death, and disregard for constitutional rights allowed by the electorate in the United States over the last seven years. Because of a single terrorist attack, liberal democracy was dormant if not dead in the nation where it should have been strongest of all.

Or consider the depopulation of half of Israel in July 2006 in response to the Hezbollah rocket attacks, as vast numbers of citizens became refugees. Democracy depends on the calm rationality of the citizenry, and that is exactly what terrorism targets.

Third is the enormous progress that can be made in the internationalisation of the conflict. Anyone with real knowledge of what is going on in Afghanistan knows that great strides have been made as the military of the UAE have engaged. The tribes whose insular, tenacious and warlike nature, and ironclad laws of hospitality, made winning the war impossible for the US alone, are being won over with the help of these valuable allies.

Although saying it induces reflexive cynicism, the international coalition MUST stay in Afghanistan until the government of Afghanistan can defend itself from the mainly foreign extremists who insinuated themselves into the national life.

The most valuable thing Bush and the neoconservatives stole from the thinking left when he politically capitalised on national disaster was not freedom, compassion, or peace, it was clarity of thought. Barack Obama is approaching the situation with neither the concept of American exceptionalism and pre-determined victory that caused the right to bungle the job, nor from the ideologically blinkered corner the left has allowed itself to be pushed into, but instead from the direction of making policy based on reality, needs and results. Now that the shadow of an imperial presidency is contracting, it's time to examine our preconceptions and start to apply knowledge and logic rather than college campus ideological assumptions.