Obama at the Rubicon, which looks a lot like a sinkhole

Most every competent history written on the straitjacket of our catastrophic involvement in South Vietnam has stressed one strapping contribution over others: We simply allowed ourselves to be sucked into the muck, little by little; it was less a matter of conscious descent and "situational awareness" than blind bureaucratic incrementalism, adding a little here and a little more there -- that little extra something the previous administration had failed to add -- always with a kind of ignorant confidence that that could complete the job, but never from a wholesale, blank-slate reassessment.

In short, as prisoners of a blinkered worldview, we poured good after bad. And yesterday, CNN's "State of the Union" was like a flashback -- a real bad trip. Host John King played for our ambassador to Afghanistan, retired Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, a video clapboard of previous interviews in which the general was bursting with optimism and good cheer.

From 2006: "Things are getting better in Afghanistan in every dimension," said Eikenberry. "If you look at it from the Qaida or the Taliban perspective, four and a half years ago, you ruled in Afghanistan. Now you've been pushed out of Afghanistan." Yet he was back a year later, saying, "we're very well-postured for success. We see a very significant increase in the combat power of the Afghan national army, the police. President Karzai continues to improve governance. So I think we're reasonably well-postured in 2007."

As we were throughout 2008, or at least we were boldly posturing for success that political year; and now, of course, in 2009, and several thousand additional troops later, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff is saying, as he repeated yesterday, on "Meet the Press," that "we've got to start to turn this thing around from a security standpoint in the next 12 to 18 months."

So, by early 2011 we should know if we've snatched victory from the jaws of 2006's victory. At which point, one assumes by this Groundhog Day logic, we'll begin re-posturing for re-success in 2012, and so on, and so on.

Oh, nay, insisted the JCS chairman: "I don’t see this as a mission of endless drift. We learned a lot of lessons from Iraq" -- which we thought we had learned from Vietnam: military escalations don't work, not in a civil war. And that's just what Iraq has reentered, whose bloody combatants our ambassador there recently described as "psychopathic." But crazy or not, it seems they learned the lessons of Vietnam better than we did: lay low in the face of overwhelming firepower, concentrate on ambushing the enemy, and wait for the superpower to exhaust itself, swinging at fleeing shadows.

Is that the lesson to which the chairman referred? You tell me. Reports, to no one's surprise, the New York Times this morning: "Over the past two days, [President Obama's special representative Richard] Holbrooke visited all four regional command centers in Afghanistan, and the message from all four followed similar lines: while the additional American troops, along with smaller increases from other NATO members, have had some benefit in the south, the numbers remain below what commanders need."

Which is what? You got it: Just a little more.

Which underscores the internal insanity of this Hobson's-choice, or carnival-fun-house-mirrors, kind of war. Reported the Times over the weekend: "Obama administration officials hoped the Afghan election would demonstrate that eight years after the American invasion, the country was stable enough to justify an expanded commitment of money and troops." But the Afghan election -- rife as it was with violence and voter intimidation -- proved, to the military mind, just the opposite: that the country is unstable enough to justify the expanded commitment of money and troops.

Now let us follow that imprisoning logic one step farther. After reinvesting a sufficient re-expansion of money and troops to make Afghanistan stable, we'll then be in the position -- see above -- to preserve stability through yet more money and troops.

What's more, a stability like, you know, Iraq's. Or Afghanistan's, circa 2006.

The paradoxes mount elsewhere, too. For instance Afghanistan's recent democratic experiment -- complete with untrammeled ballot-box stuffing and 122 rocket attacks -- is looking very much like a guaranteed do-over, which, says Afghanistan's president, could lead not to a successor government, democratically elected, but "a civil war." In that event, will we notice the difference?

Obama now confronts an age-old question, as did Eisenhower, as did Kennedy, and Johnson and Nixon. How much more can we effectively do, which the previous administration did not? Just how much is that little bit more that will seal promised success?