This week saw several prominent columnists add their two cents to the debate about whether to send additional troops to Afghanistan. Some had useful insights based on recent trips to Afghanistan, not necessarily all supportive of General McChrystal's entire request for 40,000 additional troops, but stressing the need to properly resource the effort and maintain the fortitude required to achieve success.
And then there was Tom Friedman's column on Wednesday in the New York Times.
In a piece that could have only been stranger if was written from Mumbai and used an Indian call center as a trope to explain the U.S. predicament in Afghanistan. Friedman, channeling George Will, wrote that instead of sending additional forces, "We need to be thinking about how to reduce our footprint and our goals there in a responsible way, not dig deeper." He comes to this conclusion because we supposedly do not have the allies, Afghan partners, or domestic political will required to win.
Friedman's convoluted reasoning includes gems such as "all the times when a key player in the Middle East actually did something that put a smile on my face -- all of them have one thing in common: America had nothing to do with it." He couples this with the claim that a protracted fight in Afghanistan will weaken the United States, while conveniently glossing over the implications of the United States being chased out of Afghanistan by a ragtag band of insurgents.
The sad thing about Tom Friedman's current take on Afghanistan is that he, like George Will, was once a whole hearted supporter of the war on terrorism -- someone who understood the stakes and what was required to win. On September 13, 2001, Friedman wrote "Does my country really understand that this is World War III? And if this attack was the Pearl Harbor of World War III, it means there is a long, long war ahead."
In November of 2001:
We need to be really focused, really serious, and just a little bit crazy. I don't mean we should indiscriminately kill people, especially innocent Afghans. I mean that the terrorists and their supporters need to know that from here forward we will do whatever it takes to defend our way of life -- and then some. From here forward, it's the bad guys who need to be afraid every waking moment. The more frightened our enemies are today, the fewer we will have to fight tomorrow.
By July of this year, after agonizing for several years over the situation in Iraq, the invasion of which he supported in 2003, Friedman had grown increasingly pessimistic about the situation in Afghanistan, but still wrote:
So there you have it. In grand strategic terms, I still don't know if this Afghan war makes sense anymore. I was dubious before I arrived, and I still am. But when you see two little Afghan girls crouched on the front steps of their new school, clutching tightly with both arms the notebooks handed to them by a U.S. admiral -- as if they were their first dolls -- it's hard to say: "Let's just walk away." Not yet.
How does Friedman reconcile his new view about Afghanistan with the image of those two little Afghan girls?
