Gene Lyons thinks Obama's Afghanistan plan is a long shot.

LITTLE ROCK — So our cerebral president has decided that the way out of Afghanistan is to plunge in farther.

http://moose-and-squirrel.com/gene/gene.html

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m&s

Unlike Bush, Obama will correct his course as time goes by. That is how you get from here to there.

with a very predictable outcome.

with nuclear neighbors on three borders - border which they are all to happy to ignore.

This is our last, best chance of stabilizing the region. It may work, or it may not. But if we were to just declare victory and go, as we did with Vietnam, the chaos that follows would make Cambodia's killing fields look like a fistfight in the parking lot.

The US government hates dealing with failure, and it is used to being able to stall and double-down indefinitely.

Calling it a "long shot" is mindless, baseless optimism, we have been there 8 years, spent billions of dollars, and accomplished nothing whatsoever but transient distortions in the economics and politics of the place. There is no past history of US "success" in these sorts of things either to suggest that this might be some sort of fluke, unless you think Grenada was a "success". The last time we had a real success in this sort of thing was WWII, maybe you could argue for S. Korea too. On the other hand the sort of failure one sees in Afghanistan is very like a long list of US invasions of foreign territories stretching back into the early history of the country, Vietnam in particular in recent history. All we need is seven more years and this war will have been just as long as that one, and the very length of time that this has gone on is the best possible evidence that we are bogged down and either incompetent or helpless to do anything about it.