PhillyDeals: Making the case for an Afghan withdrawal

Of our two Middle East wars,

President Obama

famously called Iraq the wrong war - remote from U.S. interests - and Afghanistan the right one: The terrorists who killed more than 2,700 Americans at the

World Trade Center

nine years ago used that crippled nation as their base.

Last week, 49 members of the Afghanistan Study Group, led by Matthew Hoh, the Marine officer who resigned from the State Department in protest of Obama's policies last year, called on the president to bring a majority of our troops home, abandoning the strategy of defeating the Taliban.

The group included military and intelligence veterans, Ivy League professors, and two prominent businessmen: Philadelphia resident Richard Vague, former head of credit cards for JPMorgan Chase & Co., and investor Leo Hindery Jr., ex-boss of AT&T Broadband, which is now part of Comcast Corp.

Vague has been the major financial backer of the group's meetings and reports. He has worked with allies such as Steve Clemons of the nonprofit New America Foundation, whose board is headed by Google chief executive officer Eric Schmidt and which also includes centrist writers such as James Fallows, Fareed Zakaria, Francis Fukuyama, and Daniel Yergin.

Vague's no pacifist. He says his concerns are economic, his goals pragmatic: He believes in policies that make America and those we deal with stronger and more prosperous.

In Afghanistan, "The U.S. is currently spending over $100 billion per year on military operations in a nation whose gross domestic product is [less than a quarter] of that," Vague told me.

"That money would be better spent on U.S. domestic issues, from debt reduction to infrastructure spending."

"The war in Afghanistan is the longest in our history," the report begins. "The U.S. interests at stake in Afghanistan do not warrant this level of sacrifice."

The terrorist group al-Qaeda, the justification for the war, "is no longer a significant presence in Afghanistan," the report states. Its sympathizers are dispersed in other failing states, such as Yemen and Somalia, and its leaders are mostly in neighboring Pakistan.

Taking and holding Afghan territory "is not essential to U.S. security, and it is not a goal for which the U.S. military is well-suited," the report continues. The government of President Hamid Karzai that we have supported is "often proven to be more corrupt and ruthless than the Taliban."

The report's critics, including professors and writers who refused to sign its final draft, have complained that it understates the possibility of the Taliban militias' overtaking the country, as the North Vietnamese did when we abandoned South Vietnam in the 1970s.

"A Taliban takeover is unlikely" because people in Afghan cities don't want it, the report maintains.

The ugly reality suggested, not stated, in the report is that the United States could live with a Taliban Afghanistan.

Afghanistan's neighbors - China, Iran, and its Arab rivals, Russia and its old satellites - have more to lose from Afghan instability than we do, and would have reason to get more involved in keeping Afghanistan quiet once we're out.

That's especially true for nuclear-armed Pakistan - whose warheads, unlike Afghanistan, are a real U.S. concern, the group says.

The report argues that we can go back and blast al-Qaeda locations if we see the terrorists regrouping there - just as we do in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.

What power does a nongovernment group such as the Afghanistan Study Group wield? In Washington, well-thought-out ideas professed by experts working together sometimes replace the vacuum of bankrupt policies. That's how a very different group of Middle East scholars and ideologues pushed the Iraq invasion through the administration of President George W. Bush, which had no Mideast policy of its own but which needed to do something spectacular to "fight terrorism."

"The bottom line is clear," the report concludes: "Our vital interests in Afghanistan are limited, and military victory is not the key to achieving them."