Will there be an Afghanistan Syndrome? - Eliot A. Cohen, washingtonpost

The rise and fall of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal -- whom President Obama dismissed Wednesday as commander of the faltering U.S.-led war in Afghanistan after an explosive magazine article featured the general and his top aides deriding the president, vice president and other civilian leaders as well as foreign allies -- will no doubt play a major role in the stories we ultimately tell ourselves about the Afghan conflict.

The United States' second Iraq war, then, will probably not lend itself to the simple revisionism of the first one -- and that is a good thing. But Afghanistan may be different. Three disturbing narratives have begun to appear to explain what may be a difficult conclusion to a conflict that Democrats and Republicans alike once described as a war of necessity.

The first is that U.S. involvement in Afghanistan was doomed to fail, because that country is "the graveyard of empires." This reflects a geopolitical essentialism; such a view yields little more than thundering clich?s. This is the same doctrine that in the 1990s contended that the people of the Balkans have always harbored unquenchable genocidal urges, and the same kind of pseudo-wisdom that, in an earlier age, suggested that Germans could be found only at one's feet or at one's throat.

The "graveyard" story line neglects some salient facts: that the Afghan population has remained supportive of the United States and its allies; that far from being the warlord-ridden anarchy of popular conception, Afghanistan has had periods of stability, relative prosperity and weak but not negligible government; and that its people's attitudes may have changed as a result of 30 years of chronic warfare.

The first of these is that the civilian leadership is always -- always -- the responsible party. It is responsible for choosing the war, responsible for the strategy, responsible for the military leaders it hires or fires, responsible for ultimate success or failure. It should never be off the hook. More........
Will there be an Afghanistan Syndrome?‎

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