Many of those advocating drawing down from Afghanistan argue that we have been fighting in Afghanistan for eight years, and if we haven’t won the war by now, we never will. The reality is that the White House has only really dedicated the effort to win for just over eight weeks, not eight years. This a worthy cause. Only if we control the ground in Afghanistan can we hunt and kill Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The men and women who served on the ground in Afghanistan who have risked and often sacrificed their lives since the awful events of September 11th have been trying to win from the very beginning, but over time they were abandoned by a Bush administration more interested in taking the fight to Iraq. Now the Obama administration is trying to salvage America’s War in Afghanistan, which we’ve been truly fighting for only eight weeks, after the Bush Administration basically lost the war over eight years.

The Obama administration is about to announce a major increase in our troop levels to Afghanistan. Voices on both the left and the right are emerging in opposition to our efforts to control the ground in Afghanistan so we can hunt and defeat al Qaeda and their Taliban hosts. Many such opponents and supposedly impartial observers, from across the political spectrum (The Nation, George Will, and Time Magazine) have taken to calling the war in Afghanistan “Obama’s War.” They have laid the success or failure of the conflict at the feet of the eight-month-old Presidency of Barack Obama. This view misplaces the credit of how catastrophically the Bush administration failed in Afghanistan, and how much of a fully national effort will be required to turn this debacle around...

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