Osama Bin Laden and the US economy

A few posts below, I wrote why I wasn't quite celebrating the death of Bin Laden:

Now there is all of this jubilation that bin Laden is dead, we got our revenge, fine. We're still fighting a war in Afghanistan, we haven't made much progress, and we're almost bankrupt as a nation. That was OBL's entire strategy. He knew he couldn't beat the United States in a conventional war, and he didn't try. His plan was to draw us in and bleed us with a thousand pin-pricks. Are we playing his game or our game? Did we play right into his hands? I'd be more willing to celebrate if OBL's strategy had failed.

Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein writes more about Bin Laden's war against the US economy. He reaches the same conclusion that I did. How could one not come to that conclusion? Pre-9/11 the US economy was running surpluses with a minuscule debt relative to GDP. We were arguably the first hyper-power in history. Now, when the dollar starts to fall, I'm reading WSJ articles about how this is almost certainly not the start of a collapse of American currency and its economy...certainly not, right? We're at the point where we have to reassure ourselves that an economic collapse is not imminent.

Should we exit Afghanistan with dignity?

Really, the book "Nixon and Kissinger" should be required reading as the discussion about ending the war in Afghanistan starts to pick up. We should stay and fight in Afghanistan if we think our interests are at stake and we think we can win the war (however defined). By contrast, we should leave Afghanistan if our interests are no longer at stake, or if we don't believe there is a reasonable strategy through which a victory could be accomplished, given human and financial considerations. In other words, if we "win" by sacrificing thousands of soldiers' lives and trillions of dollars for meager gains, we didn't really win. We just lost in a different way.

What we should not do is stay and fight in Afghanistan so that we can "exit with dignity". That is exactly what Richard Nixon did in Vietnam. Nixon sacrificed the lives of thousands of US troops in a war that he knew we weren't going to win, and a war that he was actively terminating, because he did not want a stain on his honor (and we all know how important Nixonian honor turned out to be). We ended up losing Vietnam without dignity anyway, as the world quickly saw what a farce the face-saving agreement with the communists was. Remember helicopters evacuating the US embassy in Saigon?

The long term consequences of the US withdrawing from Vietnam without dignity were precisely nil. Nobody doubted our strength in the long-term, even if morale was sapped a bit in the short term. I would argue that morale would have been less damaged in Vietnam had we ended the war sooner and saved thousands of lives, though. Furthermore, from the perspective of credible military deterrence, America would be more feared by non-state Al Qaeda types if they believed we could get involved in effective short-term military operations without always settling down for a decade-long war.

The reason I brought this up was because I saw some candidates at the Fox News GOP Presidential Debate say that we should make sure we exit Afghanistan with dignity. The suggestion that the lives of US soldiers are worth less than such petty superficiality is nothing less than reprehensible. Any politician who places priority on such nonsense should send their sons to execute the last face-saving operations of the failing war. The politician who puffs their chest out and talks a tough game about "honor" and "dignity" when sending other peoples' children to fight and die is the worst sort of politician there is. I wish Americans could see through that garbage.

This is why it is important

...to keep American forces in Afghanistan so we can beat the Taliban:

Because if we don't, they will manage to find mentally unstable and technically incompetent American recruits to fail to start really big fires in Times Square.
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