We are experiencing a festival of liberal hypocrisy on the Afghan war, as all the left-wing doves who touted the war as absolutely essential for years back off now that it’s no longer a politically convenient war. Note these lines in Frank Rich’s column today:

Obama finds himself at that same lonely decision point now. Though he came to the presidency declaring Afghanistan a “war of necessity,” circumstances have since changed. While the Taliban thrives there, Al Qaeda’s ground zero is next-door in nuclear-armed Pakistan.

So when did circumstances change? When did al-Qaeda basically leave Afghanistan so the Taliban is the real worry there and the chief home of the terror group is Pakistan? If you read Rich literally, it must have been sometime between August and today, because Obama didn’t just come to the presidency saying Afghanistan is a necessary war, he said it at the VFW last month. But circumstances changed? Again, when?

As of May, according to Rich, al-Qaeda was still a threat in Afghanistan. It hadn’t been “vanquished” there:

In truth, the Bush administration had lost Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, not least because it started diverting huge assets to Iraq before accomplishing the mission of vanquishing Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. That decision makes us less safe to this very minute.

Back in July last year, supporting more troops in Afghanistan was a sign of Barack

Obama’s strategic genius:

Looking back now, we can see that the fortnight preceding the candidate’s flight to Kuwait was like a sequence in an old movie where wind blows away calendar pages to announce an epochal plot turn. First, on July 7, the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, dissed Bush dogma by raising the prospect of a withdrawal timetable for our troops. Then, on July 15, Mr. McCain suddenly noticed that more Americans are dying in Afghanistan than Iraq and called for more American forces to be sent there. It was a long-overdue recognition of the obvious that he could no longer avoid: both Robert Gates, the defense secretary, and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had already called for more American troops to battle the resurgent Taliban, echoing the policy proposed by Mr. Obama a year ago.

And the week prior to that he was hailing Obama for “recognizing Afghanistan as the central front in the war against al Qaeda”:

“In a time of war,” Mr. McCain said last week, “the commander in chief doesn’t get a learning curve.” Fair enough, but he imparted this wisdom in a speech that was almost a year behind Mr. Obama in recognizing Afghanistan as the central front in the war against Al Qaeda. Given that it took the deadliest Taliban suicide bombing in Kabul since 9/11 to get Mr. McCain’s attention, you have to wonder if even General Custer’s learning curve was faster than his.

The central front! Did Frank Rich really know so little about the Afghan theater (al-Qaeda had been mostly chased out long ago), or was he just willing to use any club with which to beat the Bush administration and to trumpet the amazing qualities of Barack Obama? Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were both.

(By the way, another changed circumstance Rich mentions today is the corruption of the Afghan government. But he was aware of that even as he sounded like Patton on the war. From January: “He [Bush] gave Afghanistan a thriving `market economy’ (if you count its skyrocketing opium trade) and a `democratically elected president’ (presiding over one of the world’s most corrupt governments).”