It took barely 24 hours for the troops-out-of-Afghanistan chorus to break into an outpouring of editorials demanding the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan now that Osama bin Laden is dead. Now you have your prize, they smugly hummed, so let's call it a day. Though there is sometimes an underlying resentment that bin Laden was taken from this world--like when Chris Hedges says his "stomach sank" upon hearing the news--the stoppist opportunists are seizing what they can from the moment anyways.

The "bin Laden's done, now let's desist" argument suffers from numerous fallacies, the first of which is an appalling historical amnesia. It's not in the very distant past that the US already once washed its hands of Afghanistan prematurely after some fairly significant covert meddling in Afghan affairs, in the interest of their own foreign policy objectives.

As Afghanistan turned to face a post-Soviet world at the dawn of the 1990s, it found America's back turned, and much of the rest of the international commmunity followed suit. Into the post-Najibullah void poured the competing muj factions who unleashed violence and chaos over a population in desperate need of a functioning state, rather than a...More >>