Victory In Afghanistan Is Not Certain: Analysis

Afghanistan has been called "the right war"; "a war we can win"; "the war we should have been fighting all along." This should set off loud alarms because it suggests that military victory in Afghanistan will be nearly automatic if we just show up with enough troops. And, once again, some of our top military and political leaders are planning ahead for the last war; in this case, they're trying to duplicate the so-called victory in Iraq.

Any notions of certainty are both frightening and naive. Frightening, because they're founded in the belief that all we have to do is disengage our combat brigades from Iraq and redeploy them to Afghanistan to re-create the success we achieved eight years ago against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Naive, because they're based on the recurring fantasy that 30,000 more U.S. troops will transform Afghanistan into an ersatz version of a Muslim democracy. Like Iraq.

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