When Will the Last Pair of American Boots Leave Afghanistan?

Max Boot reads the tea leaves in the WaPo and fears that all previous talk of a long-term partnership with Kabul will be soon be rendered meaningless.

I think significant elements of the administration, starting at the top, are looking for a way out of Afghanistan and they are using disputes with Karzai as an excuse. The president who once called Afghanistan the necessary war appears to be motivated now primarily by the necessity of disengagement, at least as he sees it. [Not just "necessary" but the "war we must win"! --ed.]

The results for U.S. interests and for Afghanistan are likely to be dire, because if U.S. troops leave, so will our NATO allies. And the U.S. and its allies will be unlikely to continue pouring in the billions of dollars necessary to keep the Afghan security forces and the Afghan government functioning. That makes a collapse, of the kind that occurred after the Soviet withdrawal, much more likely–and with it a return of the Taliban and Haqqanis and their al-Qaeda allies.

In the old days, people talked about the lessons of the US being deeply involved in Afghanistan in the 1980s then suddenly pulling out and the whole thing becoming such a mess we had to go back in. Not much talk about that anymore.

My Kind of American Exceptionalism

Today on Foreign Policy, David Rothkopf has penned a column entitled Power Paradox: Why America Can Only Be Great by Being Unexceptional. In it, he sympathizes Vladimir Putin's op-ed assault on American exceptionalism, although Rothkopf's arguments manage to be misguided without descending to the level of Soviet hilarity that Putin achieved. Rothkopf writes,

As the president himself has asserted as recently as his U.N. General Assembly speech, the United States believes that it alone among nations has the right to go "on a break" from international law whenever it suits us. This is the fundamental dimension of American exceptionalism.

I don't often put on my Obama-defender hat, but Rothkopf's interpretation is remarkably unfair. What the President said was

While the U.N. was designed to prevent wars between states, increasingly we face the challenge of preventing slaughter within states...I have made it clear that even when America’s core interests are not directly threatened, we stand ready to do our part to prevent mass atrocities and protect human rights.

In other words, when international law is held up as an excuse for passivity in the face of ethnic cleansing and genocide, America will consider doing what is right, not what is legal according to an incoherent regime that is mainly honored in the breach by those who seek legitimacy for their crimes, not protect the innocent (cf. Putin, Vladimir).