Nato Helicopter Disaster Raises More War Doubts

The rapidly rising U.S. death toll in Afghanistan—paired with a lack of discernible military progress there—is raising new questions about President Obama’s war policy.   During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama accused then-President George W. Bush of shortchanging the Afghan war effort in favor of the Iraq War and promised to significantly boost U.S. troop levels if elected.  Since taking office, Obama has more than tripled the number of American forces in Afghanistan, including a surge of 33,000 U.S. reinforcements last year.

But the administration has never clearly articulated its specific aims in Afghanistan, laid out metrics for gauging progress there, or evinced a consistent argument for why the war should still be fought. Obama administration officials defended the unpopular Afghan surge by arguing it was essential to eradicating the lingering al-Qaeda presence in the country.  After the killing of Osama bin Laden, by contrast, a senior administration official told reporters that that the U.S. hadn’t “seen a terrorist threat emanating from Afghanistan for the past seven or eight years,” seemingly undercutting the main White House justification for the war’s escalation.