Will Marshall and Jim Arkedis, of the liberal Progressive Policy Institute, explain here why (i) Afghanistan tests not only President Obama, but also Democrats, and (ii) they support the counterinsurgency option.
A couple of comments on things they said:
"We back the counterinsurgency option not because we're highly confident of its success, but because stabilizing Afghanistan is more consistent with America's long-term security interests and our responsibilities to the Afghan people, who overwhelmingly reject the Taliban."
I appreciate their comment about "our responsibilities to the Afghan people". Too often, Americans, including many of the coastal liberals* who support the PPI and helped elect President Obama, take a "me-first, the heck with what the U.S. (or us) may have said before" approach to the rest of the world. If it becomes too hard, too inconvenient, then too bad. We’re rich, and we can just worry about ourselves. It’s good to hear an acknowledgement of a responsibility to people who have relied on what we promised them.
"Let's be clear: We're not arguing that Obama should make his decision based on a desire to ‘look tough’ on national security. We're saying Democrats ought to think long and hard before forsaking a war that Obama has defined, both during the campaign and as president, as necessary to Americans' security."
With respect to the "war that Obama has defined … as necessary to Americans’ security," coastal liberals never really believed Afghanistan was necessary (or at least they haven’t since they realized it was going to be hard and expensive and they were going to have to do it). It was fine to use Afghanistan as a club with which to hit George Bush during the campaign, but now that President Bush is gone, the club can be put aside; it’s no longer needed. As for those who believed what the coastal liberals said about Afghanistan while George Bush was President, see above.
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* "Coastal" in this instance includes, in addition to the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the Great Lakes. It does not, however, include the Gulf of Mexico, or at least not very much of it.
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