The new Afghanistan ?strategy? is not really about Afghanistan at all. It is a holding pattern. BO, as Bill Dodd likes to call him ... and it is kind of catchy, is spending his political capital elsewhere. He spent a fair amount on bailouts. He?s spending a lot more on health care. We?ll see what is left. Afghanistan is a political problem in the very narrow sense of internal American politics. Someone is going to have to lose Afghanistan. Whoever it is may be able to put a Nixonian ?peace with honor? face on it, but even then it will be about as thin a face as can be. No one will buy it. It will exhaust any politician?s capital and leave him or her a permanently lame duck. I don?t think BO is ready for that. It would take someone of a magnificence not to be found on the American political scene.

It may be true that there are subterranean agendas (the Bagram Air Base) and, in a strange way, that would be reassuring. At least it would mean there was some purpose. A bad one. But a purpose nonetheless. At the moment we find ourselves without any purpose whatsoever.

Afghanistan was not and is not a nation state by any definition. It was one of those absurd creations of the British. After the Russian defeat it resorted to its natural state of tribal and ethnic divisions loosely connected by trade, tradition and conflict. The Taliban came to prominence in the south along the main trade route where criminal warlords were crippling trade and terrorizing the population. The Taliban grew as a response to this chaos and by force and accord gained control of the region and established security and stability. The Russians had left a puppet regime behind and the Taliban and a number of other groups including the so-called Northern Alliance (our initial allies in the Afghanistan invasion) undertook to overthrow the puppet regime. The Taliban relying on substantial aid from the Pakistinian Intelligence Service through which we had been funneling aid willy-nilly to all the anti-Russian combatants won the day and assumed control of Kabul deposing the Russian puppets. The Taliban never did gain control of the entire country but it did succeed in marginalizing the stiffest opposition in the north and had come very close to eliminating it when we undertook the post 9/11 invasion.

The Taliban had a lot of political capital in the south where it had ended a miserable period of warlord rape and pillage. It was spending that capital on a campaign to purify the nation of Western influence and of an urbane style of Islam. It continued to be sustained by Pakistan?s Intelligence Service and by Osama?s money and it was understandable that it would offer him and his movement safe harbor. None of the surrounding countries - Iraq, Iran and Pakistan ? were interested in being purified and each for its own reasons and in varying degrees tolerated the Taliban regime. Iraq didn?t see it as a problem but kept a wary eye on the portion of its own population that might be most susceptible to the romantic or religious appeal of purification. Pakistan was happy to have a country on its western border that would have nothing to do with its chief adversary India. Iran alone was prepared to take some action and sought to assist the United States in that regard but was brusquely rebuffed by the Bush people. We now have on our plate an isolated Iran that is our best hope for an ally but not likely to accept the job now, a Pakistan that is determined to keep Afghanistan free of Indian influence no matter what, and an Iraq which we have weakened to the point where the purification peddlers stand a better chance.

If there is a genius able to craft a diplomatic way forward through this tangle it would be wonderful, but I wouldn?t count on it. The sadness for me is that by the time the depth of the stupidity of our involvement becomes clear no one will remember who dug the hole in the first place.

I wish we weren?t there. I wish we had never gone there. It was stupid. Persisting now is even more stupid. But we will persist until some kind of diplomatic effort gets all the players together and some largely face-saving deal can be sealed. One thing sure for America: We won?t get out cheap.

There are a lot of scenarios to be crafted from what will remain and Bill Dodd is probably right that we will resort to the old ways. We will let Israel continue to wag us this way and that for its own purposes and swallow whole the anti-Iran sentiment that is so easily sold to the numb-nuts. We will prop up the oil rich in exchange for their money never quite realizing that we have become mercenaries for doomed regimes.

Righteousness is a great motivator and in the context of international relations a terrible guide. But once unleashed, righteousness is as hard to rein in as smoke. W and his grinning mentor Cheney unleashed it. We await the hero who can rein it in. And you can already hear the conversations. We still hear them about Viet Nam ? how if we had just left it to the military and kept the politicians out of it we could have won. Perhaps you hear such conversations after every failed effort. Nobody likes to think they got sucker punched by history.