Is David Sirota freaking kidding me?

David Sirota asks a series of less-than-thoughtful "simple" questions about President Obama's plan for dealing with Afghanistan. I don't agree with Sirota's characterization of Obama's plan as a "massive escalation," so I have a few questions for Sirota myself.

One, the President has set an 18-month deadline for re-evaluating what's going on, though granted it's not a timeline for complete withdrawal. How is this a "massive escalation"?

Two, what would Sirota have the administration do? Withdraw our forces completely right away without doing something to stabilize the land mass between Iran and Pakistan? Why does Sirota like acid thrown in schoolgirls' faces so much?

And three, regarding his "Where's the antiwar movement" complaint, there was a protest at Philadelphia City Hall yesterday afternoon, which some friends of mine attended. Sirota lives in Denver, I think, so of course he wouldn't have known about it. But there are protests planned for Denver and Colorado Springs. They're small, to be sure, but it's pretty lame of Sirota to try to make his point by denying their existence -- he'd get better mileage out of the situation by decrying how few people are protesting despite the toll of the Afghanistan war on the soldiers at Fort Carson. Or if he's genuinely disappointed at the lack of a sizeable antiwar protest, then why isn't he organizing and attending one?

I don't envy the President's position. I don't know what I'd do if Afghanistan were thrown in my lap, but I don't think Sirota's questions are particularly thoughtful. I think it's staggeringly naïve to imply that it's in our nation's best interests to quit Afghanistan and leave the country in the hands of militants, terrorists, grifters, grafters, and acid-throwing, eschatological Dark Ages religionists -- with a nuclearizing state to the west and a fully nuclear state to the east. Is Sirota freaking kidding me?

And I'm a pacifist! It's all nice and liberal and sweet to complain about how we can't bring peace to Afghanistan, but that's begging the question that bringing peace to Afghanistan is President Obama's goal. At this point, he should probably settle for helping establish a stable government that, if it does get its hands on nuclear weapons, won't use them to blow away the infidels across the way in Europe, invade Pakistan on the one side, go after Iran's oil fields on the other (does Iran need to be given a legitimate reason to expand its nuclear capabilities?), and exact some long-festering revenge on the ex-Soviets to boot. In the face of these real geopolitical questions, Sirota's "simple" questions are just that: simple and naïve.