Of course, U.S. interests in Afghanistan are very different from Afghan self-interests: The United States is there to fight terrorism, not to give the Afghans a better life or protect them from the Taliban. With the terrorist threat that prompted the war in the first place having both diminished and moved elsewhere, the United States has little reason to stay. But this is the kind of high-level arithmetic that is easy to perform only from a very great distance. Afghanistan is a heartbreaking, endlessly suffering country that lodges itself very deeply inside those who spend time there. After two visits in two years I barely qualify as a casual tourist there, but even so I don't have the heart to argue the other side of the case.

So yes, the calculus that determines the pace of withdrawal must take account of Afghanistan's future as well as of U.S. security interests. Even here, however, there is an important caveat. The tens of billions of dollars the United States has pumped into Afghanistan are largely responsible for the country's massive corruption,and for the outsize power of the warlords and a new generation of power brokers. Turning off the spigot would damage Afghanistan's economic prospects, but it would also limit the opportunities for graft and for the political power made possible by instant wealth. The same is true for the military: As long as U.S. troops are available to do the fighting, the Afghan National Army will let them do it. Dependence corrupts.

In sum, the magnitude of the commitment going forward should be determined not just by the national sense of economic depletion or by disenchantment with a decade of reckless and shortsighted military engagements, but by an honest reckoning of U.S. and Afghan interests. My guess -- and it's only a guess -- is that the United States and NATO need to keep troops there until 2014, but that those troops should be going home faster, and putting the Afghan army into the lead faster, than either many Afghan leaders would like or the White House now anticipates.

But I also recognize there is a deus ex machina that could make all these fine calculations irrelevant. The killing of Osama bin Laden has made American and international officials more optimistic than they had been previously about a political deal with the Taliban. A combination of that accomplishment and American military success is said to have knocked some of the stuffing out of the insurgency. Low-level commanders have begun to "reintegrate" in larger numbers. I heard veiled rumors of talks, or talks about talks. The problem of withdrawal could solve itself if the insurgents agree to lay down their arms.

Perhaps we should recognize here not so much strategic progress as shared exhaustion. The war has gone on forever; everyone wants to go home. "Reconciliation" may be the Paris peace talks of Afghanistan: a chance to leave with "honor." As Martine van Bijlert of the Afghanistan Analysts Network put it to me, "This is about the narrative, not the result." The United States and NATO may be quite happy to bless whatever shotgun union with insurgents the Afghan government accepts. And Afghanistan, she says, would then "muddle on" as it did, for example, in the interval between the end of the Soviet invasion and the beginning of the Taliban conquest. That's a cynical scenario; but it is also, after all, one we've seen before.  

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