Oh look, three years after the fact, the war in Afghanistan is hot again … in the leftwing blogs:
Am I arguing that on balance I think the Afghanistan war was “wrong?” Honestly, I don’t even know enough to answer that question. I supported it at the time, even though I had justifiable misgivings about the details, but the question isn’t whether it was “justified” in some simplistic sense- it’s whether we achieved desirable and necessary aims at a minimum of cost which couldn’t otherwise be achieved.
This New Republican desire to marginalize the peaceniks is simply the identical logic and rhetoric which led them to be marginalized during the march to Iraq. We see how well that worked out. The peaceniks weren’t necessarily right on Afghanistan, and while I was an Iraq peacenik it wasn’t necessarily the case at the time that I was right. However, in both cases the country would have been better served if we’d had a wider and more comprehensive debate on the goals, wisdom, purpose, methods, and post- conflict planning than we did.
Opposition to the war in Afghanistan was in fact a legitimate position, even if it was the wrong position, and could have been an honest position by people who weren’t simply knee-jerk anti-war, or america-haters, or people who, like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, thought we got what we deserved on 9/11, or anything else. People may have thought there were better ways to punish those responsible and to combat terrorism, whether or not they were correct.
Atrios, in response to a post by Kevin “objectively wrong on Iraq” Drum:
If the Taliban’s refusal to hand over Osama bin Laden after 9/11 wasn’t enough to justify military action, I’m not sure what is — and I think it’s fair to say that anyone who loudly opposed the Afghanistan war is just flatly opposed to any use of American military power at all.
Drum’s position is ridiculous on its face, but Atrios’ isn’t much better. Look at the stated aims of the
Afghanistan war: kill or capture Osama Bin Laden, destroy Al Quida and its allies in the Taliban, bring
“democracy and freedom” to Afghanistan. Have any of these been fulfilled? Could any of these be fulfilled by military action?
Of course not.
My position at the time was that a war against Afghanistan would only hurt the country even more, would not destroy Bin Laden Al Quida and would be bungled by the Bush administration. I believed then as I do now, that terrorism is better fought by the police than it is by soldiers, that bombing Afghanistan to the stone age, again was an overreaction and a sideshow, a distraction. The US could not be seen to be helpless in the face of the September 11 attacks and had to do something, even if this was the wrong thing to do. Meanwhile, it offered a nice smokescreen for Bush and co to implement their real plans, to start the preparations for the war against Iraq, not to mention the extralegal torture ring they establish in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and in client states like Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Pakistan.
It was understandable that liberals would support this war, understandable but wrong. I really think this is somewhat obvious three years on, with Afghanistan in as much turmoil as before September 2001, Al Quaida actually stronger and Osama Bin Laden still on the loose.