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Famous last words — “finish the job in Afghanistan.” American and allied armies invaded soon after 9/11 and overthrew the Taliban in a few weeks, but it turned out the job wasn’t finished. The Taliban leaked back in. Was the problem simply that we were two combat brigades short?
“The main reason we are losing in Afghanistan,” Thomas Friedman wrote in the Times on July 30, “is not because there are too few American soldiers, but because there are not enough Afghans ready to fight and die for the kind of government we want.” He approvingly quoted from a July Time cover story by Harvard professor and Kabul resident Rory Stewart: “A troop increase is likely to inflame Afghan nationalism because Afghans are more anti-foreign than we acknowledge, and the support for our presence in the insurgency areas is declining.”
