Two different perspectives, both of which I think are reading. First, Matt Eckel at Foreign Policy Watch, on the “inertia” of war:

If the fight in Afghanistan is really one of national necessity, then refusing to give the Karzai government a “blank check” and putting something like a timetable on withdrawal makes no sense. If the fight is truly necessary, then we must commit as many resources as it takes for as long as it takes to win. If it really isn’t, on the other hand, then why spend more blood and treasure? Saying that Afghanistan is a war of urgency and necessity, then qualifying our commitment to it, isn’t a coherent strategy. Stephen Walt guesses, and I think he’s right, that Obama’s decision has as much to do with domestic politics as it does with the broader strategic situation. To test that, do a thought experiment. If we had no military presence in Afghanistan right now, and the situation were similar (a small contingent of al-Qaeda fighters holed up in the Af-Pak border region, a weak and corrupt Afghan government, a large scale Islamist insurgency that threatens that government’s continued viability), would committing 100,000 troops to stabilize the government, defeat the Taliban and eliminate al-Qaeda be something we were seriously considering? I doubt it.

The problem, it seems to me, is that once wars get started, it’s politically almost impossible to end them without either a) winning or b) committing political suicide. Some have proposed that President Obama should have the “courage” to tell the American people that the war isn’t winnable in any real sense, and that it’s time for us to begin winding it down. That may be true. Americans’ lives are at stake, after all. Still, it should at least be acknowledged that were Obama to follow that course, he would probably be sealing the fate of his administration. I don’t care how many Americans are skeptical about the war in Afghanistan. Most of those same people would punish Obama severely if the U.S. were to withdraw and they watched the government there fall to the Taliban.

I’ve bolded the crucial nugget of his post. He’s right of course. Who could imagine such a thing? But now that we’re there, who can imagine simply leaving?

That thought doesn’t temper the bitter disappointment of Garry Willis though, at Obama’s decision to ramp up what he regards as an unnecessary and intractable conflict:

He said that he would not oppose war in general, but dumb wars. On that basis, we went for him. And now he betrays us. Although he talked of a larger commitment to Afghanistan during his campaign, he has now officially adopted his very own war, one with all the disqualifications that he attacked in the Iraq engagement. This war too is a dumb one. It has even less indigenous props than Iraq did.

Iraq at least had a functioning government (though a tyrannical one). The Afghanistan government that replaced the Taliban is not only corrupt but ineffectual. The country is riven by tribal war, Islamic militancy, and warlordism, and fueled by a drug economy —interrupting the drug industry will destabilize what order there is and increase hostility to us.

We have been in Afghanistan for eight years, earning hatred as occupiers, and after this record for longevity in American wars we will be there for still more years earning even more hatred. It gives us not another Iraq but another Vietnam, with wobbly rulers and an alien culture.

Although Obama says he plans to begin withdrawal from Afghanistan in July 2011, he will meanwhile be sending there not only soldiers but the contract employees that cling about us now like camp followers, corrupt adjuncts in perpetuity. Obama did not mention these plagues that now equal the number of military personnel we dispatch. We are sending off thousands of people to take and give bribes to drug dealers in Afghanistan.

If we had wanted Bush’s wars, and contractors, and corruption, we could have voted for John McCain. At least we would have seen our foe facing us, not felt him at our back, as now we do.

I think we still have a chance in Afghanistan, but that doesn’t mean Eckel isn’t right about the insanity of the circumstances that have led us to this point, and it doesn’t mean that Willis might not be right about the utter foolishness of hoping for a positive outcome.