For an outstanding counter-perspective (that is, counter to my own perspective) on President Obama's recently announced policy on Afghanistan, check out Fareed Zakaria's latest:

It might seem hard to reconcile a more targeted and focused foreign policy with the expansion of a war and the introduction of 30,000 troops. But it is not unprecedented. When Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger entered the White House in 1969, they inherited a war in Vietnam that they might have believed in at some theoretical level, but that they recognized was bleeding the country. Over their years in office, they focused on shoring up America's power position through diplomacy with the Soviet Union, China, Egypt, and Israel. But they also recognized that they had to deal with the crisis in Vietnam and said explicitly that they were going to try to scale back America's involvement there. In this they succeeded. By April 1969, soon after Nixon took office, there were 543,000 American troops in Vietnam. At the end of his first term, there were fewer than 20,000 left. But in between, in order to keep the enemy on the defensive, to gain momentum, and to create space for American troops to leave, Nixon and Kissinger ordered a series of offensive military maneuvers that were designed to hit the North Vietnamese hard. Surge and then draw down, you might say.

....

Ultimately, however, one hopes that President Obama will keep another lesson of Vietnam firmly in mind. Withdrawing from a messy situation did not permanently damage America's national security. The United States suffered the most humiliating exit imaginable from South Vietnam in 1975, followed by reversals in Africa, Central America, and Iran. Yet within a decade, America had regained a commanding position internationally, and within 15 years its principal adversary, the Soviet Union, had collapsed. The key element in this resurgence was nothing that happened abroad-it was America's ability to revive its economic strength at home, the engine of its superpower status.

Ultimately, Zakaria in this piece argues that we should keep the Afghan stabilisation mission in Afghanistan. Does it really matter that we kill each and every insurgent/ al Qaeda operative in the mountains of Afghanistan? No, he says. Does it matter that we don't let Afghanistan revert back to the state it was in during Taleban rule? Yes.

According to Zakaria and other thoughtful realists,  the point is that Afghanistan can't be permitted to be a base for terror against the US or an impetus for spiralling chaos in the region more broadly. Beyond that, do we really care? Zakaria takes a thinly veiled shot at the moral arguments of those of us supportive of a more energetic and assertive strategy in Afghanistan when he says, "our role as a strong and successful superpower is to make it possible for good things to happen-not just for Afghan schoolgirls, but for millions around the world."

I disagree with Zakaria's view that strongly affirming the dignity of Afghan women and their right to be free of inconceivable cruelty is something to be mocked - and to be clear, he did mock that view a bit here. But he is making a strong point predicated upon a hard-headed view of the world.

So long as it doesn't re-emerge as a terrorist stronghold, how much does Afghanistan matter?

The post below will give you an insight into my view of this. What's yours?