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Article Excerpt
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
THE Taliban throws acid in the faces of little girls for trying to learn to read. It also bombs grade schools with poison gas, crushes homosexuals, and executes dissidents of every conceivable definition. Medieval, hyper-religious, misogynistic, homophobic, iconoclastic (in the literal sense of destroyers of art), and just plain cruel, the Taliban represents nearly everything today's progressive liberals claim to despise. If only the Taliban could somehow be counted as capitalistic evangelical Christians, they'd have a perfect score. Still: They throw acid in the eyes of little girls. That should make up for quite a bit of the shortfall.
And yet it doesn't.
As of this writing, we don't know what the president's Afghanistan policy will ultimately be. But we do know that the White House has been contemplating switching from a counterinsurgency policy to a counterterrorist policy, because it has contemplated very publicly. The former would involve defeating both the Taliban and the Afghan franchises of al-Qaeda and putting the country on a path toward something like a decent society; the latter would involve "surgical" or "targeted" strikes on al-Qaeda, leaving the Afghans to work things out for themselves. All sorts of trial balloons have been launched from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and to date, the reactions from liberals have varied. But as far as I've been able to determine, not one has expressed any righteous indignation over the suggestion that we might have to let the Taliban off the hook.
Now, the soundness of an al-Qaeda-centric strategy or something like it is a question for another time. It may be that the Afghan people will, of necessity, become a write-off. America has betrayed allies, broken promises (explicit and implicit), and abandoned subjugated peoples before. Just ask the Poles, the Hungarians, the Hmong, the South Vietnamese, the Cubans, the Shiites, the North Koreans, the Kurds, and, if trends continue, quite possibly the Israelis. For the most part these decisions didn't spring from villainy, but from necessity, or at least the perception of necessity. Sometimes the options are limited, and the choices are very bad. If moral imperatives were not constrained by the demands of political, not to mention physical, reality, America would have liberated Eastern Europe from Stalin's clutches the day Hitler blew his brains out, if not sooner.
Today's question is, rather: Whatever happened to liberal idealism?
WHEN the White House started floating the idea of moving from a "war of necessity" with the Taliban to what might be called a "peace of necessity" with the Taliban, the response from liberals was either relief or concern that Obama was still being too belligerent. Arianna Huffington and Rachel Maddow want America to leave Afghanistan to the Taliban. The Washington Post's E. J. Dionne articulated well the conventional wisdom among liberals: Afghanistan is an acceptable loss if it means the rescue of Obama's presidency and the success of his domestic agenda. "Those most eager...
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