This Joe Klein piece is a doozy (via Glenn Greenwald):

Let’s start with a fact: the Indian Embassy in Kabul has suffered major, lethal bomb attacks twice in the past two years. There is little question in the intelligence community that these attacks were staged by terrorist allies of the Pakistani Army. The Pakistanis are absolutely convinced that if the U.S. leaves Afghanistan, India will jump in, supporting the non-Pashtun elements in the country–indeed, India was a supporter of the Northern Alliance’s guerrilla war against the Taliban in the 1990s (although, it must be said, the Pakistanis have a rather exaggerated sense of Indian involvement).

Why is this a problem we should care about? Because India and Pakistan both have nuclear weapons. Because tensions between the two countries would escalate dramatically if we were to abandon the region. And, most important, because our departure would empower the more radical elements of the Pakistani military and intelligence services–not merely in their support of the Taliban, but also, potentially, in their ability to stage an Islamist coup d’etat. This is the worst scenario imaginable: a nuclear Pakistan, with allies of Osama Bin Laden controlling the trigger. (Nor would this be the first Islamist coup: Zia al-Haq staged one in the late 1970s, which we supported–against the Russian invasion of Afghanistan.)

Far-fetched? Well, it’s certainly a worst case scenario–but it’s far more plausible than the domino theory that led us into Vietnam.

You see? Because we justified a bad war with a fanciful and unlikely dire outcome, why not justify another with one that is only slightly less so? Klein is arguing that we should stay in Afghanistan because India and Pakistan might nuke each other if we don’t, and because our leaving would empower Islamic radicals to topple the Pakistani government. First off, I don’t understand why anything Pakistan and India might want to do to each other with their nukes is our problem except in the broadest sense, and I don’t see why our soldiers getting killed in Afghanistan is the best way to go about handling the problem of nuclear war between Afghanistan and Pakistan anyway. Second, this bit about the Islamists taking over in Pakistan gets bandied about an awful lot, without anybody really bothering to explain or explore how likely this is. I’m betting that the likelihood of the Taliban ever taking over in Pakistan are extremely slim. The odds that they may attack a nuclear facility and steal a nuke are still long but more worrisome, and nothing can be done about that problem by hanging around in Afghanistan. At essence, the problem is that Pakistan and India have nuclear weapons in the first place, but that horse has already long fled the barn, right?

There are plenty of good reasons to continue fighting in Afghanistan that are directly related to our own security and which aim to prevent real, likely threats to our security. Fashioning unlikely threats, or threats that are tangential to our interests, really isn’t necessary at this point.