Yesterday, Barack Obama announced to West Pointers, as well as the rest of the world, that 30,000 more American soldiers will be fighting in Afghanistan by Summer 2010. Instead of another Obama photo, the Washington Post’s front page featured a shot of the West Point cadets listening to their Commander in Chief, and looking worried.

Obama’s decision comes amid debate amongst the chattering classes about what to do in Afghanistan. Even Thomas Friedman, who still supports American involvement in Afghanistan, expresses skepticism concerning the wisdom of continued U.S. presence. On the other side, Stephen M. Walt, a professor of International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, wrote an editorial in the latest issue of Washington Report on Middle East Affairs about how the U.S. should abandon a failing campaign he deems pointless anyway. “U.S. victory in Afghanistan won’t put an end to al-Qaeda,” Walt writes. “And if the outcome in Afghanistan has little effect n the threat al-Qaeda poses, there is little reason to squander more American blood and treasure there.”

Al-Qaeda isn’t the reason the U.S. should stay in Afghanistan, the Afghans are. The United States can’t ethically occupy and destroy large parts of a country and then leave it to humanitarian NGO’s, like the UN, to clean up the tragic mess. Moreover, Mr. Walt’s solution to curbing al-Qaeda’s influence in the country involves “cruise missiles and armed drones,” technologies that have so far had hit or miss success in, well, not killing civilians. Basically, what Mr. Walt advocates is resetting Afghanistan’s broken bones excruciatingly slowly and fomenting resentment of America’s very existence, not just resistance against its military occupation. If the plan in Afghanistan in the first place was preventing terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, winning the hearts and minds of young, impressionable men, then incinerating their grandmothers isn’t the way to go.

But what makes more boots on the ground a better choice than just lobbing missiles on occasion? Obama’s commitment of 30,000 more soldiers means that America’s presence there have the aid of 60,000 more eyes and ears, and along with each pair a human conscience and intuition, not an exorbitantly priced guidance system some contractor cheated the Pentagon into purchasing.
But this means hundreds, if not thousands, more Americans will meet gruesome deaths or injury at the hands of the insurgency. That said, the American death toll will probably never surpass the number of Afghan civilians who have already faced similar horrible fates, like the 35 refugees who perished on November 11th (Armistice Day, ironically enough) when a U.S. air strike mistook their vehicle for an enemy target.
The United States needs to stay in Afghanistan to ensure that the destruction we’ve wrought on the country wasn’t for naught. Cutting and running isn’t an option. And even if defeating the Taliban doesn’t make American soil safer, as Mr. Walt suggests, it might be able to improve the lives of Afghans through agricultural development and funding for education, which is what will make sure the Taliban, if they’re ever decisively ousted, don’t regroup and return to power. More than that, the only way to finally defang the Taliban for the sake of the Afghans is to enter into negotiations with them, if only to split the organization into Taliban who will talk and who won’t. This is the tactic Gen. David Petraeus employed in Iraq in 2007 to break the back of the Sunni insurgency. While no policy of occupation in Afghanistan or Iraq will result in national liberation, there are methods of mitigating the intensity of internecine violence.
Nevertheless, I should temper this enthusiasm for a bolstering American force with the fact that all of it could just as easily go horribly wrong, depending on the consciences that sit behind and between those 120,000 young eyes and ears. And while I wouldn’t venture to recommend any tactic in particular for the Army and Marine Corps to follow, wanton brutality against civilians and torture will result in America continuing to fail.
Obviously, an escalation of the war, which is what Obama’s move means, is nothing short of tragic. Indeed, some of those West Point cadets in the audience will meet their death because of the President’s decision. With them, countless Afghans will also die. But our withdrawal guarantees the slaughter of those who aided our occupation. Without a government pliant to the West’s will, funding for humanitarian and development efforts will cease, left without any sort of assurance of security from a sovereign authority, Afghan or American. In the scramble for power after a hasty U.S. withdrawal, violent clashes between rival ethnic and religious elements of Afghan society are a virtual certainty. Clearly, any bargain we might make with the present situation in Afghanistan involves some measure of innocent blood being shed in the future. And national liberation might have become an obsolete aspiration, since nationhood today demands the immediate dilution of sovereign power to the indifferent mandates of supranational authority.
More than that, perhaps we all need to temper our expectations for Afghanistan. A mountainous, landlocked country, it is likely Afghanistan will never develop, doomed to remain beholden to the good will of a concerned global citizenry and beleaguered by the ambitions of Empire. A nation building enterprise there is a bit like performing brain surgery on one whose faculties may have already suffered irreparable damage.