For as long as I can remember, Afghanistan has been, in one way or another, a failed state: one of those countries whose government is hateful to its own people, in dubious and intermittent control of its territory, and as a result liable to attract all sorts of really unpleasant people who plague not just the Afghans, but everyone else as well. Every so often, when I am thinking about one of these countries, I feel like throwing up my hands and saying: why don’t we just go in and fix it? Normally we can’t, since normally one is not supposed to go around invading other countries without some very compelling reason: having been attacked, facing a clear and imminent threat which can be met by no other means, stopping an ongoing humanitarian disaster.
However, if by some total misfortune one of these conditions is met, we can legitimately invade such a country. And then we have it in our power to transform it from an ongoing disaster into a normal country. A chance like this comes along only very rarely, and it should not, in my opinion, be squandered without some very good reason to do so. For countries like Afghanistan, Somalia, and the like are, as I said, a plague both to their own people and to those around them; a persistent source of significant problems that there is, normally, no good way to set right. When the opportunity to solve these problems once and for all comes our way, we would be fools to pass it up. This is all the more true in the case of Afghanistan, since in this case a second very rare condition existed: there was someone to run the country who both was decent and had popular legitimacy. (I am not saying that Karzai is perfect; just that it is very rare, under the circumstances, for there to be someone who is non-disastrous, and that this, too, was an opportunity that should not have been squandered.)