Obama finds himself at that same lonely decision point now. Though he came to the presidency declaring Afghanistan a “war of necessity,” circumstances have since changed. While the Taliban thrives there, Al Qaeda’s ground zero is next-door in nuclear-armed Pakistan. Last month’s blatantly corrupt, and arguably stolen, Afghanistan election ended any pretense that Hamid Karzai is a credible counter to the Taliban or a legitimate partner for America in a counterinsurgency project of enormous risk and cost. Indeed, Karzai, whose brother is a reputed narcotics trafficker, is a double for Ngo Dinh Diem, the corrupt South Vietnamese president whose brother also presided over a vast, government-sanctioned criminal enterprise in the early 1960s. And unlike Kennedy, whose C.I.A. helped take out the Diem brothers, Obama doesn’t have a coup in his toolbox.

Goldstein points out there are other indisputable then-and-now analogies as well. Much as Vietnam could not be secured over the centuries by China, France, Japan or the United States, so Afghanistan has been a notorious graveyard for the ambitions of Alexander the Great, the British and the Soviets. “Some states in world politics are simply not susceptible to intervention by the great powers,” Goldstein told me. He also notes that the insurgencies in Afghanistan and Vietnam share the same geographical advantage. As the porous border of neighboring North Vietnam provided sanctuary and facilitated support to our enemy then, so Pakistan serves our enemy today.

Most worrisome, in Goldstein’s view, is the notion that a recycling of America’s failed “clear and hold” strategy in Vietnam could work in Afghanistan. How can American forces protect the population, let alone help build a functioning nation, in a tribal narco-state consisting of some 40,000 mostly rural villages over an area larger than California and New York combined?

Image Credit... Barry Blitt

Even if we routed the Taliban in another decade or two, after countless casualties and billions of dollars, how would that stop Al Qaeda from coalescing in Somalia or some other criminal host state? How would a Taliban-free Afghanistan stop a jihadist trained in Pakistan’s Qaeda camps from mounting a terrorist plot in Denver and Queens?

Already hawks are arguing that any deviation from McChrystal’s combat-troop requests is tantamount to surrender and “immediate withdrawal.” But that all-in or all-out argument, a fixture of the Iraq debate, is just as false a choice here. Obama is not contemplating either surrender to terrorists or withdrawal from Afghanistan. One prime alternative is the counterterrorism plan championed by Biden. As The Times reported, it would scale back American forces in Afghanistan to “focus more on rooting out Al Qaeda there and in Pakistan.”

Obama’s decision, whichever it is, will demand all the wisdom and political courage he can muster. If he adds combat troops, he’ll be extending a deteriorating eight-year-long war without a majority of his country or his own party behind him. He’ll have to explain why more American lives should be yoked to the Karzai “government.” He’ll have to be honest in estimating the cost. (The Iraq war, which the Bush administration priced at $50 to $60 billion, is at roughly $1 trillion and counting.) He will have to finally ask recession-battered Americans what his predecessor never did: How much  and what  are you willing to sacrifice in blood and treasure for the mission?