Obama's war

This happened in Australia as well, where the ALP championed Afghanistan as the "good war" and Iraq as the "bad war", ignoring the strategic reality that Iraq is an important country for a host of strategic and demographic reasons and Afghanistan is ... not.  This is quite apart from Afghanistan's status as the graveyard of empires.  But the Left needed its war, too, and this one came with a nation-building, missionary aspect that would warm the hearts of liberals who wanted to let the oppressed go free and all that.  Unfortunately, in Afghanistan, there is a clash of medieval cultures (Pashtu, Tajik, Hazara) and the resolution of these, unless it leads to terrorist sanctuaries, is any problem of Australia (or the United States') to solve.

The saddest aspect is that President Obama could, in 2009, have ordered a thorough reassessment of Afghanistan, not just how the war was being fought but what the point of the war was, but he chose not to.  History will probably record VP Biden's internal criticism of the Afghan war as prescient but sadly the criticism should have been being made in 2006-2007 when it was clear that the TB was resurgent in southern Afghanistan.

The key passage here:

"Furthermore, Iraq was always a more solvable problem than Afghanistan for demographic and historical reasons. Compared to Afghanistan's multifarious ethnic and religious groups, Iraq is quite cohesive, with only three major ethnic groups and two languages. While Iraq experienced four years of war from 2003 to 2007, and although Saddam Hussein's regime was vicious, war-torn and bloody, Iraq was a stable paradise compared to the thirty years of near anarchy and constant warfare Afghanistan has seen since the Soviet invasion."


RealClearWorld - Come What May, Obama Owns Afghanistan