The government is broken, in Afghanistan and the United States, and if we don't use government the way it's supposed to function, if we continue to play media games with our politics, the death toll will only get worse.
Today's elections have nothing to do with throwing out incumbents and everything to do with affirming the status quo. Not a single candidate who opposes the war in Afghanistan is expected to win. It will take a lot more than partisan primaries to end the war.
The problem in Afghanistan is not picking the right or wrong counterinsurgency strategy, but picking any military strategy at all.
McChrystal and Eikenberry's plan for measuring progress is absolutely required if we care at all about the truth in Afghanistan. However, the variable in this plan is not necessarily the ability to produce these assessments, but access to the reliable, accurate information sources which provide the backbone of these assessments.
A US withdrawal does not mean abandoning the Afghans. Afghanistan suffers from too much foreign meddling, not a lack of it. And through all of it, the Afghans themselves remain completely helpless to the fate of their own country.
Answer: Zero. The military shouldn't even be involved in Afghanistan. If we want to achieve our objectives in Afghanistan, we need sustainable, civilian-only solutions.
