Wednesday, February 29, 2012

What the uber neocon derives from the Afghan mess

What Krauthammer is intimating here is that, far from calling our entire involvement in Afghanistan into question, this most recent expression of Mohammedan unreason only calls into question whether the Western powers should be preparing to leave at all. The thing that he is calling into question is not our attempt to make Afghanistan into a functioning country free from Taliban militancy, but our plans to "hand the war over" to the national Afghan forces. (Of course, the idea that any Afghan government will carry on our war after we leave has always been lunacy.)

So Krauthammer is a neocon holdout to the very last, even as the Republican rank and file are starting to abandon ship. Faced with clear evidence that we are never going to Westernize that God-forsaken place, because one cannot win over such people if our entire effort can be undone by the inadvertent disposal of several books, Krauthammer concludes that the question is now whether and how America can leave at all. Having debated these issues with some average joes who are suckers for the Grand Democracy Project, I've found that devotion to the idea of global (and especially Muslim) democratic nation-building is almost a psychosis--at some point you have to write people off as unreachable by any evidence or argument. So it is with Charles Krauthammer.

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