A war in search of an objective

A few months ago, a friend who’s a local elected official had the opportunity to meet President Obama, and he posted a question on Facebook: if you could ask the president one question, what would it be? I (somewhat) jokingly said that I’d ask “when are you going to hire me?,” but now I think I’d have a different one.

If I met President Obama, or anyone in the administration for that matter, I think what I would say is, “Tell me in under 30 seconds why we’re still in Afghanistan.”

On Saturday, 22 Navy SEALs and seven Afghan troops were killed when their helicopter was shot down while they were on the way to support other troops. It’s the highest single-day death toll in the entire 10 years we’ve been fighting in Afghanistan.

In my experience, most Americans understood the need to go after Al Qaeda and the Taliban government that was sheltering them before and after the 9/11 attacks. But it’s that stark figure – 10 years – that gets me. After 10 years, what are we still doing there?

At the moment I’m about halfway through David McCullough’s 1776, which means I’m up to August, when the British army and Royal Navy cornered Gen. Washington and much of the Continental Army at New York. As we all know, only weeks earlier the colonies had formally declared independence from Great Britain. Before that, the war was something else, something nebulous. After the Declaration of Independence, the Loyalists living in the colonies didn’t magically decide to join the rebellion (far from it), but at least the people who were fighting had a clear purpose.

I’m hardly a military historian, but it does seem to me that the wars in America’s history that were the shortest were the ones whose objectives were clear and concrete. Either we’re independent or we aren’t. Either a rebellion is put down or it isn’t. Either we get control of a region or we don’t. But the wars that dragged on and on for a decade or more – Vietnam, the occupation of the Philippines, the Indian wars – seem to have been those where the people in charge couldn’t (or wouldn’t) articulate what exactly we were supposed to be trying to accomplish.

President Obama inherited this war, but he also escalated it. On the campaign trail three years ago, he basically said that his position on the Afghan war was to get bin Laden and get out. Well, we got bin Laden. And now members of the same SEAL unit that did so have lost 22 of their members. And still, we’re not out.

So I guess what I would tell the president is this: if you can’t make a case for continued involvement in Afghanistan in 30 seconds or less, then the objective isn’t clear enough. Either come up with some sort of clear “to-do” list, or stop sending the service men and women who’ve voluntarily given up their personal freedom in defense of this country to die there in an open-ended conflict that no one can seem to define.