The 'graveyard of empires' beckons, despite ourselves

Assuming the latest Associated Press-GfK poll is accurate -- granted, a debatable assumption, since it shows significant, twin upticks in President Obama's handling of health care and the economy, even though his management of these issues has undergone nearly unnoticeable change -- any robust U.S. military effort in Afghanistan is doomed here before, inevitably, it's doomed there.

While public support for Obama's handling of the conflict remains unchanged -- 46 percent pro, 41 percent con -- any future and more aggressive prosecution of the conflict, now in its ninth grinding year, appears increasingly unpopular. As is the conflict itself: in general, support for the war is down only slightly since July, yet there's no equivalent even division -- as there is for Obama's handling of it -- between the pro forces and con.

"Forty percent said they favored [the war]," reports the AP, while a whopping "57 percent said they were opposed." You'll notice the astounding absence of "no opinion." Virtually everyone seems to have one, and its collectivity is trending prodigiously negative.

As for a troop build-up, a Westmoreland-lite counterinsurgency -- otherwise known in unembellished military parlance as an escalation? "Some 46 percent favor sending more U.S. troops there, while 50 percent oppose a troop increase."

And that, I suppose, is just the standard incongruity of public opinion. Logically, those numbers should roughly match the 40-to-57-percent split; for some reason, however, there's always a lag between what people think and what people think we should consequently do about it.

Still, however debatable the AP-GfK poll may be, it has backup. For instance the Congressional Quarterly reported yesterday the results of a Clarus Research Group poll, conducted in early October, and its numbers were striking in terms of what you might call a detectable national malaise: "Sixty-eight percent of the respondents said the United States will not win or lose the war, which will go on without resolution." And on, and on ...

Sixty-eight percent. It's hard to get that many Americans to agree even on the mythological substance of Adam and Eve, yet Afghanistan looms in their minds, it seems, as an endless, self-evident, catastrophic quagmire -- as the original "graveyard of empires."

So what's Obama to do, given all this domestic doubt, if not pushback? Well, I believe I know what he should do -- run for the evac helicopters -- but what he will do is an altogether different matter, especially since decades of pounding Republican demagoguery on Democratic wussiness have by now locked and loaded Democratic muscularity.

That's what cornered Obama into an aggressive stance vis-a-vis Afghanistan during the presidential campaign, and that -- political animals being what they naturally are -- is what must inescapably inform his future course. The masses may detest the war now, but unfortunately it doesn't follow that they'd be impervious to GOP national-security bugabooing in 2012.

That's not to say I think Obama will play cynical politics with Afghanistan; I continue to think he genuinely wants to do the right thing, and say to hell with the domestic politics of it. But, in a low-information democracy, and with many other presidential to-do items on the domestic agenda, one cannot damn entirely the politics of anything.

So what will Obama do? Sad to say, the answer to that is also historically, democratically informed: He'll probably split the difference. I hope I'm wrong in signing onto this rather disagreeable piece of conventional wisdom, but the growing consensus seems justified.

As a Reuters analysis summed up the matter yesterday, "Obama has shown a disposition for the middle ground ... and his Afghanistan strategy could follow the same pattern.... Sending as many as 40,000 additional troops ... could spark a backlash within the president's own Democratic party [while a] smaller increase of between 10,000 and 15,000 troops ... would provoke some opposition from Democrats but probably not enough to force a change of course."

Notwithstanding Obama's sensible promotion of a counterterrorism versus counterinsurgency strategy at the National Counterterrorism Center on Tuesday, a splitting-the-difference strategy would provide at least some safe semblance of all-important political cover and, as he told Congressional leaders, same day, "dispense with the straw man argument that this is about either doubling down or leaving Afghanistan."

Good luck with that utter dispensation, but we get the indicating point.

Frankly, I'd prefer to see Gen. McChrystal's 105,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan for a year and then hear -- no matter what -- that victory has been gloriously achieved and they're all coming home, rather than seeing a compromised 80,000 troops languish as targets in the graveyard for another year, to be stacked atop another, and another ...

But, there's that election, you know, in 2012, and all that Republican demagoguery, and all that low-information susceptibility, and all the bloody history of these things. I just hope to God that I and all that increasingly populated conventional wisdom are wrong, by Obama surprising us.