An American Lion

We are going to continue to see more stories like this--stories designed to get us to accept the fact that the Taliban are going to return to some form of power in Afghanistan. We are already losing the war of perception in Afghanistan, which is the first front, and our nervous partners are already more accepting of rapproachment with various "nationalistic" elements in the Taliban. The part of the Taliban that has more cachet in the region is the one that wants to make peace with the neighbors and throw al Qaeda under the bus. The real question is, how does the American defense establishment answer things like this:

The second front we're losing is the Afghans themselves, who are the United States' center of gravity in the Afghan war. Eight years into this conflict, America and its NATO allies -- who are still looked on favorably by a majority of Afghans -- are not providing large swaths of the Afghan population with the most basic public good, which is security.

It's time to table fancy counterinsurgency doctrines about "connecting the Afghan people to the government" -- Afghans have never had, and don't expect much, in the way of services from their government, and it's time now to focus on something much more basic: security.

The last government to provide Afghans with real security was ... the Taliban. When they ruled the country before 9/11, security came at a tremendous price: a brutal, theocratic regime that bankrupted the country and was a pariah on the world stage.

But in the context of Afghan history, the Taliban bringing security was decisively important, since what had immediately preceded their iron rule was a nightmarish civil war during which you could be robbed or killed at will by gangs of roving ethnic and tribal militias.

It is has been a staple of Western political theory since the mid-17th century, when Hobbes wrote "Leviathan," that if the state does not provide security to its people, life will be "nasty, brutish and short." Hobbes wrote "Leviathan" in the shadow of the English Civil War, deriving from that bloody conflict the idea that the most important political good the state can deliver is security.

The United States relearned this lesson in Iraq with some success starting in 2007. But the U.S. seems to have developed instant amnesia about this issue in Afghanistan, where around 40 percent of the country was controlled by the Taliban or was at high risk for attacks by insurgents, according to a private assessment prepared by the Afghan military in April, which was obtained by CNN.

Are you prepared to send 1.5 million men and women to Afghanistan? Anything less postpones the inevitable. Unless we violently and completely eradicate all aspects of the Taliban over the course of the next decade, we will have to accept elements of the Taliban in a coalition government. For those conditioned to assume that the Taliban and al Qaeda are one and the same, it might cause the same phony outrage that was curiously absent when we started working with various Sunni tribesmen in Iraq who were friends with the nascent al Qaeda offshoot that tried to take hold in that country.

This continues to make the case that the Obama Administration is in over its head. By failing to go for the political solution early in his tenure, and by keeping Bush's Secretary of Defense and the political generals who wish to maintain a permanent war on terror overseas, President Obama will assume total blame for any failure in Afghanistan, and rightly so. He failed to focus on the very necessary political solution that would have allowed us to wind down the Afghan war, and they no doubt thought that speeches and charm would be enough. Rhetoric won't carry you very far.

It comes down to what you will settle for. Will you settle for half-assing the defense of this country? Because we're well on our way to that.