Will President Obama earn his Nobel Prize in Afghanistan?

We need to ask how much U.S. intervention in various conflict situations promotes peace, and what might be achievable in such hot spots as Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Palestine and North Korea. The answers are so elusive that the only certainty is the extraordinary degree of uncertainty in any course of action the United States might take.

Afghanistan is the thorniest problem at the moment because the issue is the use of force to build a nation that is not worthy of that name. Afghanistan is not a functioning state, but a hodgepodge of tribes with a more or less mythical government led by a corrupt president who stole an election by massive fraud. Hamid Karzai is likely to win again in the runoff that has been forced upon him.

If the American generals seeking 40,000 more U.S. troops think that a Karzai victory will legitimatize him beyond his corrupt circle, they are dreaming. The U.S. and other NATO countries have been supporting Karzai for years in the hopes that he would spark moderates to defend their right to be governed by other than Taliban extremists. This is not happening, despite the massive buildup in U.S. troop presence since the beginning of 2008.

In his last year in office, President Bush almost doubled U.S. forces in Afghanistan, from a little more than 26,000 to more than 48,000. President Obama added to that surge with another 20,000 troops this year. Now the generals who last year said the first surge would accomplish the mission are telling the world we are losing. General McCrystal, the U.S. commander, asserts that 40,000 more troops are necessary to defeat the Taliban insurgency; without them the mission will fail.

This sounds much like General Westmoreland during the Vietnam War. He maintained that more U.S. troops would certainly prevail in a war of attrition, but 535,000 of them could not sustain a corrupt South Vietnam against a determined adversary from the North. With fraud so widespread in the recent Afghan elections that we pressured President Karzai to accept a runoff, we should be asking whether the U.S.-led effort in Afghanistan is not on behalf of a government that has less legitimacy, authority or competence than the Saigon government we shed so much blood to support a generation ago.

History should provide some useful lessons as the president contemplates whether to send more troops to Afghanistan. U.S. military involvement in other peoples' civil wars has not been notably successful. Perhaps Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia should have taught that determined fighters on their own land can chase us out or outlast us. Add to that the Afghans remarkable success in expelling intruders. The Russians could not pacify the country in the 1980s despite having all the advantages that the U.S. does not; a much larger army, a contiguous land border with much shorter supply lines, and far less need to be concerned with domestic public opinion.

President Obama would be well served by considering the possibility that the U.S. is looked upon as just another military intruder who comes in and kills for a while and then leaves villagers to their fate. The generals now acknowledge that won't work, and the rapidly mounting casualty figures suggest that we are an easy target on the battlefield. At home, Americans are showing signs of tiring of the fight, notwithstanding calls from the political right to fulfill General McCrystal's request and carry on to certain victory.

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