Is Afghanistan Worth It?

It’s never easy to point out that, in the scale of American military sacrifice, Afghanistan does not figure large. But acknowledging a historical fact does nothing to belittle the cost the war has exacted on America’s soldiers and their families: It merely offers some mental ballast to offset the swelling panic. What does belittle the sacrifice—both for those who have fallen and those who fight—is to suggest that the war is nothing but a misbegotten errand in a godforsaken land.

In last week’s column, I argued that an American withdrawal from Afghanistan, followed by a partial or complete Taliban victory, would mean a humanitarian disaster for Afghans comparable to what happened in Southeast Asia after the Communist takeover in 1975. Averting that outcome by staying in Afghanistan is the liberal case for the war.

What about the conservative case? Let’s start with the best conservative case against the war. It holds that (a) all attempts to build Afghanistan as a nation will prove as futile as all past attempts to subdue it; (b) Afghanistan is a sideshow when the focus of our efforts in the region should be Pakistan, Iran or elsewhere; (c) even a “successful” outcome in Afghanistan wouldn’t be worth the toll in lives, effort and expense; (d) we’ve basically defeated al Qaeda already and can keep them in check through drone strikes, so why are we now taking sides in a sectarian Afghan blood feud?; and (e) if Afghans massacre each other in the wake of a U.S. withdrawal, that’s their unfortunate business and further proof of proposition (a).

This analysis might be somewhat more compelling if we were having an argument about whether to invade Afghanistan in the first place, as if history were a cassette we could rewind and re-record at will. (Now there’s a liberal fantasy.) We are in Afghanistan now. So the choices before us are not what we should have done in 2001, when most Americans—and almost all conservatives—demanded we take Kandahar the way Sherman took Atlanta. The question is what we do in 2010.

For conservatives in particular, the answer ought to entail notions of consistency and responsibility. Consistency, in the sense of supporting a counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan similar to the one conservatives urged (and that worked) for Iraq after the abject failure of the “light footprint” approach advocated by Joe Biden. Responsibility, in the sense of keeping faith with those to whom we make commitments.

This is not just a moral argument: The U.S. cannot remain a superpower if the suspicion takes root that we are a feckless nation that can be stampeded into surrender by a domestic caucus of defeatists. Allies or would-be allies will make their own calculations and hedge their bets. Why should we be surprised that this is precisely what Pakistan has done vis-a-vis the Taliban? It’s not as if the U.S. hasn’t abandoned that corner of the world before to its furies.

How a feckless America is perceived by its friends is equally material to how we are perceived by our enemies. In his 1996 fatwa declaring war on the U.S., Osama bin Laden took note of American withdrawals from Beirut in 1983 and Mogadishu a decade later. “When tens of your soldiers were killed in minor battles and one American pilot was dragged through the streets . . . you withdrew, the extent of your impotence and weakness became very clear.” Is it the new conservative wisdom to prove bin Laden’s point (one that the hard men in Tehran undoubtedly share), only on a vastly greater scale?

Nor does it seem especially conservative to subscribe to the non sequitur that because Hamid Karzai is not George Washington our efforts in Afghanistan will be of no avail. Utopia is a liberal temptation; conservatism is comfortable with the good enough. In Afghanistan that would mean a run-of-the-mill Third World country that can fend for itself, menaces nobody and is an updated version of what the country was in the 1960s. That’s a reminder that Afghan history does not ineluctably condemn it to chaos or fanaticism. It’s also a reminder that the measure of success in Afghanistan isn’t whether we create a new Switzerland, but whether we avoid another South Vietnam.

“The world is what it is,” wrote V.S. Naipaul. “Men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” Afghanistan, too, is what it is, and we are in it. Can any serious conservative argue that it would be a good thing for the United States to allow itself to become nothing?

Write to bstephens@wsj.com