And as a result of the United States military, Taliban no longer is in existence. And the people of Afghanistan are now free. In other words when you say something as President you better make it clear so everybody understands what you’re saying, and you better mean what you say. –President George W. Bush, September 2004

The U.S. and its allies launched a new attack on the Taliban in Afghanistan during the early morning hours of Feb. 13. As the offensive carries on through its second week, interest in the conflict here in America seems rather muted. The country is no doubt strangled by domestic stress right now. High unemployment, health care reform, budget deficits, all of the problems Congress has somehow decided it cannot (Democrats) or will not (Republicans) fix.

But as America embarks on its new mission in and around the town of Marja—essentially a second and last chance to save an eight-year conflict that long ago gave away any military gains it may have made back in 2001—the general consensus is that this is now President Obama’s war. Contrast that with Iraq, which will always be George W. Bush’s war, no matter how many years separate him from the White House. The distinction is important for two reasons. First, Obama found his voice, and staked his claim to the national stage, based largely on his sustained condemnations of America’s involvement in Iraq. The recasting now of Obama as a war president is undoubtedly a bitter pill for his liberal supporters to swallow, many of whom mistook his Iraq opposition for pacifism. Secondly, the fact that he has so quickly claimed ownership of this war—and not inherited the conflict, as most observers clarify when discussing his handling of Iraq—makes clear the degree to which the Bush administration abandoned its mission in Afghanistan, and by extension, the earliest incarnation of its “war on terror.”

Things were much different when the U.S. first began its fight in Afghanistan in October 2001, less than a month after the September 11th attacks. The country was consumed with nationalism. The president’s approval rating was an astounding 92%, according to an ABC News/ Washington Post poll. Our military offensive was given the heroic, star-spangled name of Operation Enduring Freedom. The United Nations did not authorize the invasion, but fuck them. We had Osama bin Laden in our sights. America was going in to kick some ass.

And for a short time, we did. The U.S. and coalition forces dispatched the Taliban fairly quickly. By November, stories came back about men shaving their beards and removing their turbans. Women felt free to walk the streets without the accompaniment of men. In his absolutely essential book, The Forever War, about his years covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for The New York Times, Dexter Filkins describes a joyous new dawn after coalition forces pushed out the Taliban. Buried televisions were excavated. Cigarettes were smoked. Music blared out of restaurants.

We never did capture Osama bin Laden, but as it did with the war in Iraq, the Bush administration could always edit its purpose for invasion, and redefine its metric for success. No weapons of mass destruction? It was always about securing freedom for the people anyway. No Osama bin Laden? Khalid Sheikh Mohammed actually masterminded 9-11 and we caught him! When the deployment of 20,000 additional troops in 2007 began to show success at stemming the deterioration in Iraq a year later, war hawks went to work editing the miserable legacy that history will record of America’s involvement in Iraq.

This could be seen during the 2008 Presidential Election, when Sen. John McCain used his support of the troop surge to bolster his inane argument that, to a certain degree, he was “right” about Iraq. It was as if the first five years of the war had never happened. And for the Bush administration the troop surge represented the best eraser—one last desperate chance to clean the slate and rewrite its own cynical definition of success for a war that never had a justifiable motive outside of a trumped-up line drawn between Iraq and 9-11.

At the same time that the U.S. was deploying 20,000 additional troops to Iraq, the Taliban had already begun its resurgence in Afghanistan. An average of 400 attacks occurred each month in 2006, according to a report by NPR. By 2007, the attacks had grown to more than 500 a month. In 2008 the UN reported that the Taliban was stockpiling between 6,000 and 8,000 tons of opium, worth about $3.2 billion—money that would help fund its insurgency.

So how will Obama’s war in Afghanistan be different than Bush’s? It’s hard to say. When Obama made the order in December to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, he did so with the hope of drawing down U.S. forces in July 2011. Having an exit strategy in place, even before sending troops to battle, was Obama’s attempt at reassuring a nervous public that this war would not be like Iraq, or Bush’s Afghanistan, or the Soviet’s Afghanistan, or even more frightening—that it wasn’t headed for the dreaded Vietnam quagmire.

But after eight years that yielded only fleeting gains, it’s hard not to feel like Afghanistan is unwinnable. And Obama does not have the momentum of bloodlust at his back the way Bush did when he launched the war in Afghanistan more than eight years ago. The public only marginally supported Obama’s troop increase—by 51%, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll taken in December. Gallup has Obama’s own approval rating at 49% right now. It is unlikely that Americans will look the other way this time if the latest attempt at winning something or other in Afghanistan goes bad.

What we can only hope for now is that Obama understands the limits of American power. Some will argue that by re-launching a new mission in Afghanistan, he doesn’t. Even so, Obama needs to level with us in ways Lyndon Johnson never did with Vietnam, or Bush with Iraq. Don’t tell us we are winning if we are losing. Don’t tell us we are headed in the right direction if we are already lost.

Paul Menchaca is co-editor of Last Exit.

Copyright Last Exit 2010