Casey breaks ranks over Afghanistan

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Through the first four years of his initial six-year U.S. Senate term, Sen. Bob Casey had been something of an invisible man.
Casey, it seemed, reached the apex of a second-generation political career (his father had been a popular governor) by following two auditor general terms with a thorough thumping of incumbent Sen. Rick Santorum in 2006.
Then, he disappeared for practical purposes, becoming a "to get along, go along" back-bencher in the Senate.
Not so any longer.
In fact, Casey strongly burnished his 2012 re-election credentials last week with a strong call for President Obama to change course and bring home even more troops from Afghanistan. Casey made it clear that he sees the folly of the United States attempting to turn the failed tribal area of Afghanistan into anything approaching a modern state. After 10 years, and with increasing budget woes, the United States needs to bring home its troops, he said.
We say the same thing.
There are those who say that the Taliban, or the Chinese, will move into the vacuum.
Perhaps. But they will or won't, whenever we leave, and we ought to have no interest at all in making Afghanistan a colony, so we will leave.
In the last century, we fought a war in Europe "to end all wars," to make the world safe for democracy. A generation later, we were back in Europe, fighting another war - with a second war in the Pacific at the same time.
That's in the nature of things. It is not in our power to prevent all future conflicts. Rather, we must be prepared to meet them - and in our current state of near-bankruptcy, we cannot do that.
We need to bring home the troops, leave Afghanistan to the tribes, exit Iraq, rebuild our military while reducing deployment costs.
Casey gets that.
It is a welcome emergence from the chrysalis of obscurity for the man who is now Pennsylvania's senior senator.