George Bush Sr., had the wisdom and the strength to do it in Gulf War I. At the time I deferred to him. He was a former head of the CIA, knew spooks, and told us his call.

In retrospect George Bush Jr. only confirmed the judgement of the father.

... in Afghanistan I think we're there again.

Declare victory go home, not because we can't achieve more, but because whatever we achieve will unwind once we are actually gone. Ten years from now Afghanistan (and Iraq) will have the government they can make for themselves, regardless.

Apparently this transition to naively run elections was a bad one, but if it didn't happen now, it was going to happen in a few years.

Steve

I think that simply withdrawing from Afghanistan would be an error for tactical, strategic, legal, and moral reasons. We don't want to return to the status quo ante. We don't want to give a propaganda victory to the takfiris.

As occupying power we have a legal responsibility to turn the country over to a legitimate government. The current one isn't. And the stated and implied commitments we've made to the Afghan people are a debt of honor.

Don't get me wrong. If I'd had my way we wouldn't be in this particular fix at all (we'd be in a completely different fix). But it is the fix we're in.

If you're looking for an endgame, we should just acknowledge defeat and withdraw now. I don't think there's any objective worth achieving in Afghanistan that can be achieved with a short term commitment.

Okay, let me use a different term. What's the end state we're looking for? What's our best case scenario, the thing which, when we see it we'll think, "Good, that's what we were after."

Should we be looking to split Afghanistan into a Pashtun and non-Pashtun state? Cede the Pashtun areas to the Taliban and try to salvage the rest? Or are we holding Kabul alone against the countryside? Are we creating a prosperous "West Berlin" to act as a counterpoint to a failed Taliban state?

If not then why bother spending money on development? Develop to what end? If we could somehow remain engaged for 20 or 30 years is there something we could, even theoretically achieve? I'm honestly baffled, not just by how we get from "here" to "there" but by what "there" might be.

However, the commitment shouldn't be ours alone, indeed, it shouldn't even be mostly ours. The problem with situations like the one in the Hindu Kush isn't unique to that area and it's a world problem: what is to be done with ungoverned areas?

1) Where exactly would our forces be based? Pick any spot in Afghanistan, and if you cede the surrounding territory to the Taliban, it becomes untenable.

2) How do we support development if the Afghan government is not just corrupt but anxious and therefore highly motivated to fill their secret offshore accounts? I don't know that we can build roads and dams or whatever in Afghanistan without cooperation from local authorities.

3) Does this strategy have any more coherent an end game than the current strategy?