Joe Lieberman's speech on Afghanistan receives praise from the Huffington Post and the Corner. You can read the speech, delivered at the Brookings Institution yesterday, here. Perhaps most striking about the current debate over Afghanistan, aside from utterly predictable efforts on the far left to stymie an escalation even in this "good war," is the continuity from the Bush administration to the Obama administration. There is no serious dispute over what the objective in Afghanistan must be: the elimination of al Qaeda and other irreconcilables and the fostering of a strong, democratically-elected government.
On the subject of Afghanistan, Joe Lieberman, our favorite Democratic neocon, finds himself advocating a position that even now is very much in the mainstream. Lieberman stands at the center of a consensus that rejects the withdrawal of U.S. forces and rejects the notion that we can reduce our objectives in Afghanistan to simply denying terrorists a sanctuary or safe haven. In fact, what Lieberman has done in his speech is redefine what it means to be a "realist" on Afghanistan:
There is no question, we all need to be realists when it comes to Afghanistan, both about our objectives and about the limits of our power. And I agree with Secretary Gates that we need to have "modest expectations" about the near term in Afghanistan. But we should not and cannot take any false comfort from these modest expectations, because the way ahead is still going to be extremely hard.
We all agree, our foremost interest in Afghanistan is preventing that country from becoming a terrorist safe haven. But the only realistic way to prevent that from happening is through the emergence of a stable and legitimate political order in Afghanistan, backed by capable indigenous security forces-and neither of those realities is going to materialize without a significant and sustained American commitment. This will not be easy, but it is absolutely necessary.
Translation: the only answer in Afghanistan is democracy.
