This is the conversation that should have taken place in the White House months ago:

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Now that we've committed to a departure from Iraq, we need to resolve the future of our mission in Afghanistan. I have called this a war of necessity, and I'm ready to do as much as we need to do to accomplish our goals there. But a growing number of people, especially in our own party, believe the war is going wrong; that main force will not be able to finish the job of dislodging the Taliban and eradicating Al-Qaida.

I need to give the American people an honest account of what we aim to accomplish there, and what it will take to accomplish that.

ADVISER: And, sir, if I may say so, there is also a duty to our troops.

PRES: American lives are at stake. Our national security is on the line. Skip the niceties. I need you to be blunt.

ADV: Well, sir -- well, you are President first. But you are also Commander in Chief. Our soldiers are fighting for America in general, but they're fighting under you officially. They need you to lead. They need to know that the risk is worth their lives, and they need to hear that from you.

PRES: I'm with them heart and soul. But General McChrystal wants 40,000 more troops. I can't throw that many Americans into harm's way until I'm sure it's worth it.

ADV: We already have 86,000 Americans in harm's way. And the longer it takes to make your decision, the more doubt those soldiers will start to have about their mission. The more time you spend thinking about whether to send more troops into battle, the more the troops who are already in battle will wonder why.

PRES: After 8 years of war, you don't think we have the luxury of a little deliberation? We didn't need much time to think in 2001; and then the Iraq war monopolized the national debate. Frankly I think we're overdue for a spell of review.

ADV: Morale matters on the home front too. Every day without a decision is another day for critics of the war to score points and change minds. Deliberation has the same effect as it does in a jury trial. The longer the jury is out, the more the scales tilt toward one verdict and against the other. I don't think we can just let those scales tilt. The American people need you to lead, too.

PRES: You know the story of Vietnam. We escalated and escalated, and failed and failed. I'm not going to drag our country through that again.

ADV: And quagmire is a political phenomenon, not a military one. Any army can get out of any war at any time. But war is a political commitment to the most difficult of tasks. The calculation of that commitment varies among the leaders and supporters of the war, and over time. When those calculations diverge enough, quagmire begins.

Vietnam was a quagmire because Pres. Johnson couldn't end his own war, and Pres. Nixon dragged his feet.

But historical analogy is always hazardous, and never moreso than in comparing wars. I'm surprised at the number of people who see the face of Vietnam in the mirror of Afghanistan.

PRES: The analogy is not groundless. They're both wars fought largely on guerilla terms; both fought on the most difficult terrain; and -- at least, lately we can say -- both fought in support of dubious governments in countries with little tradition of strong central rule.

ADV: But the enemy is entirely different. Many analysts, both at the time and since, have regarded Ho Chi Minh as the champion of Vietnamese nationalism, not just the leader of the Communists. Whether that was true of him or not, no one could make that claim for the Taliban or Al-Qaida. The type of fanatic Islam they want to impose is pretty alien to Afghan society.

The Vietnamese were remarkably tenacious, but they hardly beat us with backbone alone. They were abundantly supplied by two of the world's major powers: the Soviet Union and Communist China. The Taliban and Al-Qaida have no foreign patron; just some furtive friends in Pakistan. None of the surrounding countries want them to win. Even Iran, which would love to see us fall on our face, is unsympathetic to the Taliban.

We lost 57,000 lives in 8 years of combat in Vietnam. We have lost around 800 lives in 8 years of combat in Afghanistan. If we couldn't bear that kind of loss, America would be defenseless.

Vietnam was the domino war; every justification began with the word "if". If we don't fight in Vietnam, our European allies may think we won't fight for them. If Saigon falls, Southeast Asia will fall. If we don't fight the local wars now, we'll have to fight the world war soon enough.

We're not fighting for "if" in Afghanistan; we invaded on the clearest claim of right that any nation has ever had. The Vietnam analogy implies that there is no difference between the Tonkin Gulf incident and the September 11 attacks. Well, our memories are not that short, and our patriotism is not that lightly insulted.

PRES: A fine rebuttal. But I'm afraid I missed the part about escalation. That, after all, is the crux of the present decision.

ADV: A decision that you should not even have to make. It was the responsibility of Pres. Bush to pass on to you a war that was being waged with all the resources necessary to success. Instead, they dumped their failure at your door.

If any decision costs us Afghanistan, it will be Bush's decision to start another war in 2003. That split our whole military capacity -- troops, materiel, support, leadership -- in two.

PRES: And we started losing the war we have to win, so we could win the war we never had to fight.

ADV: Because of the dereliction of the Bush administration, you can think of this decision less in terms of escalation and more as a restoration of troop levels we should have had years ago.

Which leads to my second point: don't make the Rumsfeld mistake. If you're going to escalate -- pour it on. If the Bush administration didn't learn anything else, they learned that you can't scrimp your way to victory. Unfortunately, they only got wise in Iraq, where the President's pride was at stake. But escalation did have its part to play in turning that war around. That suggests that it could be part of a turnaround in Afghanistan. It won't be the whole reason, and the turnaround won't be so dramatic. But we can't just think ourselves out of an option that has passed the test of experience.

PRES: Can we turn the war around without turning Afghanistan around? Critics of the war -- opponents of escalation -- argue that we need to confine our efforts to our own national security objectives. They think that pinpoint operations by special forces can accomplish more than the sledgehammer; and the fight for Afghanistan can be left to the Afghans.

ADV: Our grip on Afghanistan has been slipping; so we have a glimpse of the future if we let it go. The Taliban is already the de facto government of two provinces. I don't see how there can be any doubt that if we leave Afghanistan to its fate, everything we have fought for will be lost.

PRES: Now wait a minute. I don't want anyone to suggest that American men and women died in vain. That's just not true. Even if worst did come to worst in Afghanistan, we have already made one point loud and clear. In 2001, Osama Bin Laden didn't believe that America would ever take the fight to him. Well, he knows better now. This war has already taken a terrible toll on Al-Qaida. Even if we were to pull our last man out tomorrow -- they all know better now.

ADV: I stand corrected, sir. Very true. But I still don't see how we could achieve goals within the country while losing the country. With the Taliban back in charge, we could expect to lose much of the intelligence network on which both our war on terror and the proposed special forces campaign depend. And not just in Afghanistan. If Pakistan sees us abandon their neighbor to the Taliban, we can say goodbye to any real, effective cooperation from the country which many people have called more crucial than Afghanistan. No more Swat Valley crusades. The nest will be left to the vipers.

Critics have argued that we don't actually know what would become of Afghanistan. To my mind, "we don't know" is the worst-case scenario. As long as we stay in Afghanistan, we have some say in what it becomes. If we let it go now, we've got nothing but hope and prayer.

PRES: We just had 8 years of President Control Freak. That's what got us mixed up in Iraq. We need to step back from this idea that we can fine tune the world with firepower. The most we can do is to nudge Afghanistan in the right direction. We can't guide its footsteps.

ADV: And by the same token, defective government is not reason enough to turn our back on Afghanistan. If we're not going to try to control them, then we can't demand perfection of them as the price of our support, either. The critics fall into a "control freak" logic of their own.

PRES: Well, we don't urge good government for our own sake; we urge it for the sake of the Afghan people.

ADV: Yet we judge its "goodness" by our standards, not theirs.

PRES: And that may be  something of a contradiction at the present time. President Karzai may believe that this is the only way, other than Taliban terror, to put together a national government in a poor country that has never really had one. But in the long run, "our standards" really are the best assurance of freedom and justice for the people of Afghanistan.

I've saved the toughest test for last. I just saw an interview on CSPAN with David Axe, the journalist who has been embedded twice in Afghanistan; once in 2007 and once this year. I jotted down some of his remarks so I could quote them exactly:

It's a challenge, though, working with Afghan local government, because there's not a mindset that these governments exist to provide services . . . more than the Taliban, the enemy is corruption. The enemy is an Afghan government that has had a chance to pull its act together, and has declined to do so -- repeatedly. It seems that most senior Afghan officials -- actually, most Afghan officials, senior or not -- just want to get rich; just want to gather power for themselves, and don't care about Afghanistan . . . You can't win this war, by the definition of war that we've settled on, until there's an Afghan government that takes governing seriously -- and that's just not happening.

ADV: That is tough. I have the greatest respect for David Axe's work. And it's just because he's such a fine reporter that he can only speak to the present situation. Your decision has to look to the future. How long can things continue to not change?

PRES: We know that the Guomindang lost the Chinese Civil War in large part because of corruption. President Truman said "They're all thieves, every damn one of them", and cut off American aid to Chiang Kai-Shek. Will I be repeating Truman's lament someday?

ADV: China was no more critical to American national security than Vietnam was. We should be able to say the same of Afghanistan -- but we can't. Our country was attacked from that country.

I would differ with David Axe's sweeping language, but I don't doubt the evidence of his eyes. It may well be that the political challenge is greater than the military challenge. If that is so, the worst that can come of military escalation is too many soldiers with too little to do. If all we end up wasting is time and money, then let's stick with our commitment.

And it has to be pointed out that corruption is neither inevitable nor necessary to Afghan politics. Ironically, the proof comes from our enemy. The Taliban has been capitalizing on its clean reputation, in contrast to the Karzai regime. And the Taliban is made up of 100% Afghan natives. If their makeshift administrations could govern without graft, we have solid reason to hope that legitimate government can "pull its act together" in Afghanistan.

PRES: Thank you for giving it to me straight. If Pres. Bush had let anyone besides Dick Cheney talk to him like this, we wouldn't be up the creek we are today. I think I know what I'm going to do. 

Copyright 2009 Charles Jolliffe