Anti war pukes turn on Afghanistan now

Bret Stephens:

It was probably inevitable that the American left would turn sharply against the war in Afghanistan the moment it was politically opportune. Still, the speed with which it has done so has been breathtaking.

Time was when the received bipartisan and trans-Atlantic wisdom about Afghanistan was that it was the necessary war, the good war, the no-choice-but-to-fight and can't-afford-to-lose war, and that not least of everything that made the invasion and occupation of Iraq such arrant folly was that it distracted us from "finishing the job" in the place where the attacks of 9/11 were conceived and planned.

This was the wisdom candidate Barack Obama was merely regurgitating when, in an August 2007 speech, he promised that his priority as president would be "getting out of Iraq and on to the right battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan." True to his word, he has now ordered the deployment of 17,000 additional soldiers to that battlefield.

So why are the people who cheered Mr. Obama then (or offered no objection) now running for the exit signs? Why, for example, is New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, the paper's reliably liberal tribune, calling Afghanistan a "quagmire" -- after denouncing the Bush administration in 2006 for "taking its eye off the real enemy in Afghanistan"?

Call it another instance of that old logic, reductio ad Vietnam. That's the view that every U.S. military action lasting more than the flight time of a cruise missile is likely to descend into a bloody, stalemated, morally and politically intolerable Sartrean nightmare.

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What is going on is the left is in danger of losing their ability to oppose the use of force by claiming that it will lead to a quagmire. If our victory in Iraq is followed by one in Afghanistan over another insurgency using a counterinsurgency strategy that leads to a military victory the quagmires will have lost again. That is why their allies in the Obama administration are trying so hard to do a deal with the "moderate" extremist in the Taliban. They don't want the military to get credit for another win.

In their hearts they do not want to use force and they therefore do not want to see it succeed when it does win. It is why they wanted Bush to fail in Iraq.