The Afghan war is lost

Aside from the juicy tidbit here and there, not much in the latest Pentagon Papers constitutes much of a surprise.

We might not have known that the insurgents have heat-seeking missiles, the kind that the CIA once provided them to shoot at Soviet helicopters.

We might not have had precise information on how many of the drone strikes launched from a Virginia suburb were blowing up civilian bystanders or relatives of the targeted fighters.

We might not have exactly realized how many gazillions of dollars in health, education and security aid—the kinds of things Republicans wouldn’t vote to spend money on here at home even if guns were pointed at their heads—was being flushed down the toilet of corruption and mismanagement.

In short, we might not have had data on the trees, but we certainly could see the forest. It was clear that our decade of war in Afghanistan was a debacle long before Wikileaks gave us the gory details.

Now, President Obama will issue the expected harrumphs about the leaks’ damage to ‘national security’, and given his record to date he probably will persecute the leaker(s) as enthusiastically as the Bushites if not moreso.

We will hear much indignant bloviating about the violation of this or that ‘law’ on the disposition of confidential documents, under the assumption that we will be shocked, shocked, at the idea of illegality in our war-making apparatus. It would perhaps be prudent not to talk about this much by cellphone or in e-mails since we know the National Security Agency is gathering 1.2 billion of them daily—and now legally, thanks in part to Obama himself.

After Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, it took another four years for the Vietnam war to end. Applying that metric to Afghanistan would put us roughly in 2014 to close this sorry chapter--in the midst of the next presidential term. Does it really matter whose?

One of the saddest items in the Pentagon Papers was the revelation that Lyndon Johnson’s reasons for persisting in the Vietnam tragedy were:

70% - To avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat.
20% - To keep South Vietnam and the adjacent territory from Chinese hands.
10% - To permit the people of South Vietnam to enjoy a better, freer way of life.
ALSO - To emerge from the crisis without unacceptable taint from methods used.

Note the principal reason for continuing the lost cause and the attendant mayhem: to not lose.

Who can doubt that similar cynical reasoning dominates in the halls of decision-making today?