They Don't Call It "Graveyard of Empires" for Nothing

I'm with publius: the fact that Kagan, Kristol, Krauthammer and the rest of the wingnut warmongers are thrilled with Obama's Afghanistan escalation is more than enough proof that it's an inevitable catastrophe.

But if you need more evidence, here are two superb cases against increasing our involvement in Afghanistan.

In The Nation, Tom Englehardt sees an "Af-Pak Bailout" that will make the AIG giveaway seem like pocket change.

What this all adds up to is an ambitious doubling down on just about every bet already made by Washington in these last years--from the counterinsurgency war against the Taliban and the counter-terrorism war against Al Qaeda to the financial love/hate relationship with the Pakistani military and its intelligence services underway since at least the Nixon years of the early 1970s. (Many of the flattering things now being said by US officials about Pakistani Chief of the Army Staff General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, for instance, were also said about the now fallen autocrat Pervez Musharraf when he held the same position.)

SNIP

Face it, we've entered a new universe. The "homeland" is in turmoil, the planetary frontiers are aboil. Change--even change we don't want to believe in--is in the air.
In the end, as with the Obama economic team, so the foreign policy team may be pushed in new directions sooner than anyone imagines and, willy-nilly, into some genuinely new thinking about a collapsing world. But not now. Not yet. Like our present financial bailouts, like that extra $30 billion that went into AIG recently, the new Obama plan is superannuated on arrival. It represents graveyard thinking.
AIG...
Af-Pak War...
R.I.P.

Read the whole thing.

In Salon, Juan Cole writes that Obama's plan is a warmed-over version of Cold War Domino Theory. For you youngsters, that's the 50's version of "fight them over there" that got us stuck in Vietnam for 20 years.

Obama's dark vision of the overthrow of the Afghanistan government by al-Qaida-linked Taliban or the "killing" of Pakistan by small tribal groups differs little from the equally apocalyptic and implausible warnings issued by John McCain and Dick Cheney about an "al-Qaida" victory in Iraq. Ominously, the president's views are contradicted by those of his own secretary of defense. Pashtun tribes in northwestern Pakistan and southern Afghanistan have a long history of dissidence, feuding and rebellion, which is now being branded Talibanism and configured as a dire menace to the Western way of life. Obama has added yet another domino theory to the history of Washington's justifications for massive military interventions in Asia. When a policymaker gets the rationale for action wrong, he is at particular risk of falling into mission creep and stubborn commitment to a doomed and unnecessary enterprise.

SNIP

This latter-day domino theory of al-Qaida takeovers in South Asia is just as implausible as its earlier iteration in Southeast Asia (ask Thailand or the Philippines). Most of the allegations are not true or are vastly exaggerated.

SNIP

Obama's dark vision of the overthrow of the Afghanistan government by al-Qaida-linked Taliban or the "killing" of Pakistan by small tribal groups differs little from the equally apocalyptic and implausible warnings issued by John McCain and Dick Cheney about an "al-Qaida" victory in Iraq. Ominously, the president's views are contradicted by those of his own secretary of defense. Pashtun tribes in northwestern Pakistan and southern Afghanistan have a long history of dissidence, feuding and rebellion, which is now being branded Talibanism and configured as a dire menace to the Western way of life. Obama has added yet another domino theory to the history of Washington's justifications for massive military interventions in Asia. When a policymaker gets the rationale for action wrong, he is at particular risk of falling into mission creep and stubborn commitment to a doomed and unnecessary enterprise.

Read the whole thing.