What about the safe haven that then-Taliban ruled Afghanistan provided? Although not an expert, I suspect that a campaign of surgical air bombardment and the deployment of highly trained “black ops” units in very small numbers, would have been enough to neutralize the al-Qaeda organization.

Now, we are directly involved in nation-building in Afghanistan, something that has been a bloody and always futile task since the time of Alexander the Great.

The ultimate fundamental delusion underlying that effort — as it has been in countless other instances of nation-building by colonial powers — is the notion that every square inch of the earth must be contained in European-style national states. Think of all the ways this makes power maintenance for Western elites easier, and local control by people who live in those areas difficult to impossible.

Even in areas where this is patently not what the people want — Somalia springs to mind, for instance — Western nations insist on sacrificing thousands of lives and billions in resources so that those areas will resemble the Western national state system — and have done so repeatedly for a couple of centuries. Wars, and war-like repression, always accompany these efforts.

There have been few wars that produced only positive results. Even those that did, such as World War II, which destroyed the heinous Nazi German and Japanese militarist regimes, had negative outcomes for many people — Eastern Europeans, for instance, were treated to another 45 years of repression courtesy the Soviets. Stalin used the war to tighten his domestic tyranny in the Soviet Union. Nuclear weapons, with the potential for worldwide catastrophe, were invented.

It will require a great deal of courage, and a steely commitment, to move beyond the centuries-old paradigm of national state warfare. I believe the impetus for that will come, not from governments, but from ordinary people.

We now have a means, in the form of the internet, to communicate a “peace paradigm” to replace the “war paradigm,” and reach a huge percentage of the world’s people with it. And, we have a burgeoning number of international non-government organizations (NGOs) dedicated to this paradigm.

Whenever, and wherever we can support those “paradigm-shifting” organizations and activities, we should.

Still, it may work out.

He outlined a clear mission and was honest about the costs.

I’m no happier than any of my liberal or progressive friends about having to send in more troops, but if it actually helps stabilize the situation and helps bring an end to the war in Iraq — and if we actually start bringing troops home from Afghanistan in a year and a half — it will be major progress.

I understand the criticisms of Obama from the left, and of course expect the attacks from the right. But as far as I’m concerned, this president MUST succeed — or we are all fucked!