How to Schedule a War
The Incredible Shrinking Withdrawal Date
To understand just how bad the 112th Congress, elected on November
2nd and taking office on January 3rd, is likely to be for peace on
Earth, one has to understand how incredibly awful the 110th and 111th
Congresses have been during the past four years and then measure the
ways in which things are likely to become even worse.
Going, going, gone! You can almost hear the announcer’s voice
throbbing with excitement, only we’re not talking about home runs here,
but about the disappearing date on which, for the United States and its
military, the Afghan War will officially end.
Practically speaking, the answer to when it will be over is: just
this side of never. If you take the word of our Afghan War commander,
the secretary of defense, and top officials of the Obama administration
and NATO, we’re not leaving
any time soon. As with any clever time traveler, every date that's set always contains a verbal escape hatch into the future.
In my 1950s childhood, there was a cheesy (if thrilling) sci-fi flick,
The Incredible Shrinking Man,
about a fellow who passed through a radioactive cloud in the Pacific
Ocean and soon noticed that his suits were too big for him. Next thing
you knew, he was living in a doll house, holding off his pet cat, and
fighting an ordinary spider transformed into a monster. Finally, he
disappeared entirely leaving behind only a sonorous voice to tell us
that he had entered a universe where “the unbelievably small and the
unbelievably vast eventually meet, like the closing of a gigantic
circle.”
In recent weeks, without a radioactive cloud in sight, the date for
serious drawdowns of American troops in Afghanistan has followed a
similar path toward the vanishing point and is now threatening to
disappear
“over the horizon” (a
place where, we are regularly told, American troops will lurk once they
have finally handed their duties over to the Afghan forces they are
training).
If you remember, back in December 2009 President Obama
spoke
of July 2011 as a firm date to “begin the transfer of our forces out of
Afghanistan,” the moment assumedly when the beginning of the end of the
war would come into sight. In July of this year, Afghan President
Hamid Karzai
spoke of
2014 as the date when Afghan security forces "will be responsible for
all military and law enforcement operations throughout our country."
