Today’s Wall Street Journal Opinion section features two really indispensable pieces. One is on Afghanistan, with Dan Senor and Pete Wehner offering a counter to George F. Will’s advocacy of withdrawal.

The war in Afghanistan is a crucial part of America’s broader struggle against militant Islam. If we were to fail in Afghanistan, it would have calamitous consequences for both Pakistan and American credibility. It would consign the people of Afghanistan to misery and hopelessness. And Afghanistan would once again become home to a lethal mix of terrorists and insurgents and a launching point for attacks against Western and U.S. interests. Neighboring governments—especially Pakistan’s with its nuclear weapons—could quickly be destabilized and collapse.
Progress and eventual success in Afghanistan—which is difficult but doable—would, when combined with a similar outcome in Iraq, constitute a devastating blow against jihadists and help stabilize a vital and volatile region.

Here’s the problem, as I see it: I agree with Senor and Wehner on the essentials, namely that we have very good reasons to be in Afghanistan for a long time and in large numbers. Peter Feaver, one of the sharpest foreign policy thinkers, has made the case very persuasively in blog posts for Shadow Government. But Feaver has also raised another thorny problem.

There are few things more toxic for effective civil-military relations in wartime than the military believing that their political commanders are not serious about seeing the conflict through to a successful conclusion. No army can remain more resolved than the Commander-in-Chief is — not for very long, anyway. And once doubts about that resolve seep into the interagency and theater decision-making process, they are very hard to eradicate. Indeed, once entrenched, efforts to rebut them with bold statements of resolve suffer from the “thou doth protest too much” problem and may even reinforce those doubts.

We’re in a spiral. I linked a short while ago to Stephen Biddle’s excellent, judicious essay on the case for staying and fighting in Afghanistan. Part of his point is that the war in Afghanistan is “only barely” worth fighting, a sentiment I imagine Senor and Wehner would reject. Note that Senor and Wehner highlight the danger that Afghanistan might become a launching pad for attacks against the West and U.S. interests. U.S. interests are present throughout the globe, so that provides an essentially limitless case for intervention. As for attacks against the West, Biddle offered some interesting thoughts on the subject.

The United States has two primary national interests in this conflict: that Afghanistan never again become a haven for terrorism against the United States, and that chaos in Afghanistan not destabilize its neighbors, especially Pakistan. Neither interest can be dismissed, but both have limits as casus belli. The first interest is the most discussed—and the weakest argument for waging the kind of war we are now waging. The United States invaded Afghanistan in the first place to destroy the al-Qaeda safe haven there—actions clearly justified by the 9/11 attacks. But al-Qaeda is no longer based in Afghanistan, nor has it been since early 2002. By all accounts, bin Laden and his core operation are now based across the border in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). The Taliban movement in Afghanistan is clearly linked with al-Qaeda and sympathetic to it, but there is little evidence of al-Qaeda infrastructure within Afghanistan today that could directly threaten the U.S. homeland. If the current Afghan government collapsed and were replaced with a neo-Taliban regime, or if the Taliban were able to secure political control over some major contiguous fraction of Afghan territory, then perhaps al-Qaeda could re-establish a real haven there. But the risk that al-Qaeda might succeed in doing this isn’t much different than the same happening in a wide range of weak states throughout the world, from Yemen to Somalia to Djibouti to Eritrea to Sudan to the Philippines to Uzbekistan, or even parts of Latin America or southern Africa.

It’s understandable that preventing Afghanistan from becoming a safe heaven is at the heart of the political case for the war in Afghanistan, but the strategic case rests on:

The more important U.S. interest is indirect: to prevent chaos in Afghanistan from destabilizing Pakistan. With a population of 173 million (five times Afghanistan’s), a GDP of more than $160 billion (more than ten times Afghanistan’s) and a functional nuclear arsenal of perhaps twenty to fifty warheads, Pakistan is a much more dangerous prospective state sanctuary for al-Qaeda.

This is a true nightmare scenario. Biddle goes on to establish, rather depressingly, that we have very limited means of influencing the Pakistanis, and so the real case for committing troops to Afghanistan is as follows:

If we cannot reliably influence Pakistan for the better, we should at least heed the Hippocratic Oath: Do no harm. With so little actual leverage, we cannot afford to make the problem any worse than it already is. And failure in Afghanistan would make the problem in Pakistan much harder. … This is the single greatest U.S. interest in Afghanistan: to prevent it from aggravating Pakistan’s internal problems and magnifying the danger of an al-Qaeda nuclear-armed sanctuary there.

And yet the stakes “do not merit an infinitely high price tag,” in Biddle’s words.

The tragedy for me is that I think we can succeed in Afghanistan at a reasonable cost. If we commit enough troops now, we can make a difference. But if we pursue a politically-influenced half-way option, in which we commit a somewhat smaller number of troops than we need so as not to alarm the public, we will actually have more casualties and a far higher likelihood of failure than we would with a more robust approach.

Keep in mind that managing Pakistan’s perceptions is vitally important. The Pakistanis don’t trust us and never will; because the Pakistani security establishment convinced that we will eventually “bug out,” they have a strong interest in keeping a Plan B of accommodating the Taliban in Afghanistan in the hopes of having an ally that will not challenge their rule in Pakistan. To be sure, more and more Pakistanis recognize that the Taliban is a transnational movement that poses a serious threat to the integrity of the Pakistani state itself. But many in Pakistan believe that they can still cut a favorable deal. The only way to solve this problem is to convince the Pakistanis that the United States is fully committed to the war effort. And like it or not, the Pakistani elite reads the same newspapers that we do. In a sense, the expectations management game has already been lost. So where does that leave us?

Part of me thinks that we should either commit fully to the war effort or we should recognize that our effort in Afghanistan might be a lost cause. I find this prospect extremely depressing and I’d like to be convinced otherwise. Rest assured, George F. Will is not alone among conservatives, and anti-war sentiment will only grow in the conservative grassroots if people get the sense that soldiers live are being put in danger not in pursuit of an achievable strategic goal but rather to avoid a backlash from hawks.

In the healthcare debate, the Obama White House crafted their proposals in anticipation of conservative objections and to counter the inevitable attacks. They knew that Americans like employer-provided coverage, and so they savaged McCain for undermining that system. This put them in a bind when it came to crafting a workable policy. Similarly, the anti-war left was careful to attack the “bad war” in Iraq and call for a more strenuous effort to fight the “good war” in Afghanistan. This was an effective means of channeling the sentiments of conservative independents who were committed to the fight against Al Qaeda, yet who were skeptical on the importance of the Iraqi front. But did it represent a real commitment? Now that those same conservative independents are abandoning the president, and now that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have less political salience, it seems very likely that the White House will distance itself.

Unlike yours truly, Matt Yglesias is not an Afghanistan hawk. He does, however, offer some useful insight into what Team Obama is thinking.