Of all the Pandora boxes Bush left behind for Obama, the Afgan situation is probably the most problematic. Most of my friends, including ones with military backgrounds and from military families, are just done with Iraq and Afghanistan and see any more involvement as a waste of good lives and time. And how many years ago now was 9/11? But Iraq was never more than an insanely stupid and disastrous sideshow that had nothing to do with 9/11 or the supposed war on terror — it was just a bizarre implementation of some brain dead PNAC policy done under the FUD of 9/11.

But as with health care reform, Obama has always been pretty clear, even if the media hasn’t been, about his intentions towards Afghanistan. While I personally have felt that health care reform should have waited until the economy was further along into recovery mode, I’m fully in agreement with Obama on Afghanistan — that’s always been the place where we should have focuses our energies. Besides giving aid, comfort and protection to Bin Laden (‘member him?) and al-Qaeda, it has turned out that the Afghan connection to Pakistan has been a lot more serious than what anyone knew during the Bush years. If a terrorist group was to get its hands on a nuke, it would mostly be via Pakistan.

Unfortunately, this badly mistaken grouping of Iraq with Afghanistan, along with the general burnout over several years now of war in that general area, had made support very weak. Whereas Bush could have blamed Canada and gotten support back in those post 9/11 days, it’s a very different situation now. So Obama’s plan of sending in the amount of troops the generals want, but setting a late 2011 drawdown date was probably the result of months of intense analysis and discussion — and it probably was no coincidence that it will approximately coincide with the 10th anniversary of 9/11.