Dear Whoever Reads This

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As readers may have noticed, there hasn't been much new material here recently. Reality has been getting too depressing lately, I needed an escape. Sadly, I still read my e-mails, and I received this a little while ago from someone who claims to be the Vice President:

From: Vice President Joe Biden
To: My Real Self
Subject: Afghanistan
Date: Dec 2, 2009 7:09 PM

Real Self --

Last night, President Obama laid out his plan to defend our national interest by refocusing our efforts on three clear goals: defeating al Qaeda, stabilizing Pakistan, and breaking the Taliban's momentum in Afghanistan.

To achieve these goals, the President has authorized the rapid deployment of 30,000 more troops in Afghanistan, with a firm commitment to begin bringing our troops home in 2011.

It's a clean break from the failed Afghanistan policy of the Bush administration, and a new, focused strategy that can succeed.

Please take a moment to watch the President's address to the nation and read more about his plan:

http://my.democrats.org/AfghanistanAddress

Our new strategy ends the era of blank checks for Afghanistan's leaders, facilitates a responsible transition to Afghan security forces, and begins bringing our troops home in 2011.

Please take a moment to listen to President Obama outline his plan -- and pass this along to anyone you know who wants to learn more:

http://my.democrats.org/AfghanistanAddress

Thank you,

Vice President Joe Biden

I saved myself half an hour by reading the speech instead. Turns out, I got all that fence-straddling silliness over with in about five minutes. Here's where it gets particularly good:

Let me be clear: none of this will be easy. The struggle against violent extremism will not be finished quickly, and it extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan. It will be an enduring test of our free society, and our leadership in the world. And unlike the great power conflicts and clear lines of division that defined the 20th Century, our effort will involve disorderly regions and diffuse enemies.

Obama's Afghan speech: Full text

Of course, this "enduring test" will start ending in eighteen months. As Glenn Greenwald pointed out, there was a little something for everybody: the generals get more troops and resources, the Afghan government gets a new lease on life, the critics of that government's corruption get a wave, and the peaceniks get a schedule. It's all very Obamaesque.

I couldn't help myself. I wrote back:

I read the speech, and I didn't see a plan there. What I saw looked like a declaration of principles - goals if you will. The plan still looks a bit sketchy. We've been killing people in Afghanistan for eight years now. It doesn't seem to have gotten us any closer to a solution than we were in 2003. If anything, things are worse now. Every time we bomb a mosque, a home, or a wedding party we create new potential enemies, and new groups of people who want us to just get the hell out of their country. How do you get around that? How are we going to find the Taliban (or Al Qaeda) in a country where few of us speak the language and we have even fewer friends than we did when we started? Afghans are mountain people. They're naturally distrustful of strangers to begin with. When those strangers come and kill some of them for seemingly no reason, it's not going to make them more kindly disposed to us. We've been doing that for eight years.

How are we going to make Afghanistan's government less corrupt? Will we, or the United Nations, be taking it over?

Afghanistan isn't so much a country as group of individual territories loosely tied together by a central government. If it ever had a national identity, it's been savaged by the last three decades of conflict and theocracy. Are we really prepared to sign up to change all that? Counterinsurgency operations take time. Think in terms of decades. Do we have that long? When are you guys going to fix the economy, instead of producing ever more expensive band-aids? We could use those tens of billions of dollars fixing our own country, instead of breaking someone else's.

It's great that NATO is supporting this effort. That's important. But I just can't get over the idea that this is all way too late and will be way more costly than it's worth to anyone. I hope that I'm wrong, because it's clear we're in it for the long haul regardless.

The Vice President probably won't read it, but maybe someone will.

Mine has been a gradual change from reluctant support for what seemed like a necessary war in Afghanistan, to a gradual realization that we've made such a mess of it that there may be no way to recover the situation, even if we can adequately define what "recover the situation" means. Do we stop at finding Osama Bin Laden (Remember him? Big terrorist type; had something to do with 9/11?), or do we try to leave a stable national government in a place that hasn't really had one for decades?

I think I'll go back to ignoring reality for a while longer. It's clearly a popular avocation.

UPDATE (Dec. 3): As usual, Jon Stewart's take on this is instructive:

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The short version - forget Vietnam, this sounds a lot like Iraq.