I am going to play devil’s advocate here.

Some people quite sincerely believe Afghan democracy will bring to that country the values we cherish like respect for the rights of individuals, gender equality, tolerance for religious minorities, etc., and Afghan democracy will be under threat if we left. But time and time again, our obsession with setting up “Muslim democracies” have backfired, due to our own wide-eyed naivety and our inability to recognize these Muslim cultures are fundamentally different from us. All over the world, Muslims have proven very willing to democratically elect Islamists who fetishize Sharia, oppress women, and advocate war with the west. Are we forgetting the Gazans who elected Hamas? Are we ignoring the multitude of women in the Iranian Basij who happily voted for Ahmadinejad? Why are we still in delusions that Hamid Karzai and the rest of his folks are as fervently religious, anti-Semitic, anti-Western, and are as eager to kill the apostate (already proven) and homosexual (already proven) as anyone in Afghanistan?

The notion that all of humanity shares fundamental beliefs in common, that given the chance, we’d all choose freedom and individuality is the misguided thinking typically associated with the left. Sadly, in Afghanistan and in other countries, there is no shortage of people - half of them women - who support Islamism, who value following Allah above their self interests, who therefore believe education for girls is a sin and are willing to be second-class citizens. We think this is crazy, but there is no shortage of craziness in this world! Scientologists and Raelians are crazy in their own way, Islam is just another cult by a different name!

In order to make democracy work, it requires overturning Afghanistan’s Islamic values in a manner similar to the de-Nazification of Germany following WW2; and replacing fundamentalist Islam with socially liberal, secular values of the west. That is not going to happen - not in a thousand years (they culture is still in the Middle Ages). The people who would rise to power in Afghanistan will never let it happen because they wouldn’t be elected.

Thus, we need to establish what our objectives are in Afghanistan. Clearly, our conern is stopping terroris,- whether this is directed against us, against India, or Israel, or anyone else. The question then is, do we need to spend HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS each year, sacrifising the lives of hundreds of NATO soldiers, to prop up this Islamic insanity that cannot be modernized, and will continue to be anti-progress, anti-women, anti-Jew, anti-West, no matter how much we wished otherwise? Or are there cheaper methods of achieving the same thing?

Note that this is not about kowtowing to Islam; this is about finding an optimum strategy to fight it and contain it. And I don’t think the Iraqis / Afghans are worth a single American life. We can, after all, kill uppity militants with drones and long range bombers without risking a single soldier.