Why Are We Still in Afghanistan?

Afghanistan has no economy—aside from humanitarian aide and its earnings from the drug trade—but it’s still too early to despair. In an essay for The London Review of Books, Rory Stewart explains that under the thick cloak of Western rhetoric (think of Obama and Gordon Brown’s hard-hitting, but ultimately abstract, statements), we’ve come to view Afghanistan as virtually indistinguishable from its neighboring nations. And as Christopher Hitchens points out in a response to Stewart on Slate, Obama may have gotten in over his head on Afghanistan—and ultimately won’t be able to deliver what he’s promised there. Stewart argues that an escalation won’t lead the nation towards economic stability, which, Hitchens describes as a fundamental Catch-22: “You need to defeat the Taliban to build a state and you need to build a state to defeat the Taliban.” Therefore, going forward, Hitchens asks, “Might we not be able to shape events in Afghanistan nearer to our heart’s desire without making ourselves responsible for the running of the whole nation and society?”