Af-going-going-gone-istan

In the latest AP-GfK poll we see a seven-point uptick, from last month, in disapproval of President Obama's handling of Afghanistan, as well as a four-point increase -- now at 54 percent -- in opposition to sending more troops.

Whether they're just weary of what seems to be an unwinnable war or are consumed with all things domestically troubled, the American people, by and large, "get it" -- assuming the poll's accuracy, of course, and assuming other polling corroboration and assuming a sustained uptick in opposition. That's a lot of assumptions, but the atmospherics, if you will, would also seem to confirm them.

We've had it. We've had enough. We want out; or at the very least, we'd like to see no more than a little hastened training of Afghan security forces. In that immutable nation, one more year of ramming our heads into a brick wall is as good as 20.

Yes, we get it, unlike Defense Secretary Bob Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who, along with Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen, as the NY Times reported yesterday, "are coalescing around a proposal to send 30,000 or more additional American troops to Afghanistan."

Frankly I'm more surprised at Bush-administration-holdover Gates than I am at Ms. Clinton. For months, DefSec Bob has radiated with profound doubts about a substantially military solution in Afghanistan, whereas the latter has always been rather reliably neoconservative, given her enduring presidential ambitions. Hillary, it appears, is still reading from the same old political playbook, the catastrophe of Iraq notwithstanding. Some pols never learn.

(Generally it's at about this point that some enraged Clintonista, still suffering from another lost war, stops reading and starts writing an amusingly indignant email. Save it -- or not, if you're that reader and you're feeling especially possessed. But allow me to first remind you that the preceding summation is about as theoretical as Darwinian evolution.)

Some pols have learned, however, such as Vice President Joe Biden, who, along with White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, as the Times delicately put it, is "skeptical" of an escalation.

Furthermore, reports the Times this morning in another piece, we can now add to those sane voices none other than that of our ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, a retired lieutenant general who's in agreement with four-star general and National Security Adviser Jim Jones -- in agreement, that is, that a buildup spells trouble.

The Pentagon disagrees, preferring instead what's now being called the "Gates Option" -- a plan, as the Washington Post described it yesterday, that "would deploy an additional 30,000 to 35,000 U.S. troops to carry out [Gen. Stanley] McChrystal's strategy."

But get this (which the American people and Joe and Rahm and Karl and Jim evidently do, but Bob and Hillary and the Pentagon don't): The aforementioned strategy would rely on our NATO allies to compensate for the multi-thousand troop shortfall in McChrystal's requested deployment; yet in October "NATO defense ministers endorsed McChrystal's strategy during a meeting in Slovakia ... [without] pledg[ing] any additional forces."

In words other than in the Post's, NATO countries were saying: Capital idea, Stan. Why don't you do that? Let us know, in a decade or two, how that's working out for you.

As for learning the learning curve of the only pol who really counts at the moment -- President Obama -- that must wait for probably another three weeks, says the White House in the latest update to one of the longest strategy reviews since Woodrow Wilson pondered Europe's conflagration.

Still, the waiting has been, one hopes, beneficial. For there appears to be some chronological, as well as attitudinal, linkage between Eikenberry's expressed reservations and the White House's sudden "examination" of an "option that would send relatively few troops to Afghanistan, about 10,000 to 15,000, with most designated as trainers for the Afghan security forces. Pentagon officials said the low-end option ... would mean little or no significant increase in American combat forces in Afghanistan."

Even that is an intellectual stretch. More troops, more training -- to accomplish precisely what? In Afghanistan, al Qaeda is a mere ghost. The armed resistance is thoroughly native. The culture is both ageless and changeless. Security forces have proven unreliable. Karzai's corruption is ineradicable. The population is resentful.

And, every 1,000 additional troops mean another billion bucks a year, not to mention the incalculable cost of more American lives. To accomplish -- what? And only to concede non-accomplishment -- when?