The Moment
By Romesh Ratnesar
The war in Afghanistan is not going well. But don't take our word for it. "We're not going to win this war," rues Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, Britain's top commander in Afghanistan. The current strategy is "doomed to fail," says the British ambassador Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles. The latest U.S. National Intelligence Estimate notes that the country is in a "downward spiral." Since May, some 180 coalition troops have died in Afghanistan, compared with 120 in Iraq. On Oct. 14, four more NATO soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb.
Both Barack Obama and John McCain want to increase the 33,000-person U.S. military presence, but pacifying a country so large and unruly will require hundreds of thousands of troops that the U.S. doesn't have. And so no less a figure than General David Petraeus has endorsed a wholly different solution: negotiating with the Taliban. "You have to talk to enemies," Petraeus said on Oct. 8. "This is how you end these kinds of conflicts."
That policy would appear to have the support of Obama--who has said that as President, he would meet "with anyone at the time and place of my choosing"--though not of McCain, who cites Petraeus as an ally every day on the campaign trail but whose running mate, Sarah Palin, has called negotiating with rogue regimes "beyond naive."
There's another word for this naivete: realism. Though he rarely admits it, President Bush has made realism the centerpiece of his second term, dispatching envoys to sit down with Sunni insurgents in Iraq, the Stalinist leadership in North Korea and the theocrats of Iran. The results have been mixed at best, and no one believes the Taliban will give up as soon as the U.S. breaks bread with them. But the alternative--endless conflict and occupation--is worse. The next President will take office in an age of dwindling resources, diminished U.S. influence and a public weary of war. Invoking John F. Kennedy, Obama says, "Strong countries ... speak with their adversaries." Wounded ones don't have a choice.