Let's Support President Obama's Afghanistan Policy!

President Obama is catching it from both the left and the right in response to his speech to the Army corps of cadets announcing his Afghanistan policy. In today's Washington Post, conservative Charles Krauthammer let him have it for his "call to arms so ambivalent, so tentative, so defensive" at West Point. In the same paper, liberal Eugene Robinson maligned the president for taking a "wrong path in Afghanistan" and (supposedly) paying scant attention to countries like Somalia to which al-Qaeda presumably could relocate if we succeed in freezing it out of Afghanistan.

They are both wrong.

I support the president's policy — I who opposed the Vietnam War, the first Gulf War, and the War in Iraq. Though I am a liberal Democrat and a dove, I think the war in Afghanistan needs to be fought, and won. The reason: we have simply got to defeat radical Islam.

I consider it a liberal thing, my support of the president. How could it be anything but a liberal value, to oppose those in the world who would dictate people's lives and beliefs at the point of a gun? Who would crush every society that does not share their version of their religion? Who would keep women in burqas and perennial servitude? Children in fear of other children?

Conservatives like Mr. Krauthammer want the president to announce his "outright rejection of withdrawal or retreat," insisting the president's July 2011 date certain to begin withdrawing troops is a lily-livered blunder. I don't think it's a blunder, I think it is a ploy. I think the president wants to use it to pressure Mr. Karzai to get busy instituting needed reform and building up his own forces' credibility, before time runs out.

Liberals like Mr. Robinson want the president to abandon the Afghanistan surge because "al-Qaeda's murderous philosophy, which is the real enemy, has no physical base. It can erupt anywhere — even, perhaps, on a heavily guarded U.S. Army post in the middle of Texas." But that kind of thinking is crazy. It's like saying don't take out a malignant brain tumor because the cancer could pop up somewhere else anyway. Not only that, but what if the surgeon can't get all of the malignancy?

That's lily-livered. And Mr. Krauthammer isn't much better, with his insistence on the president swaggering like John Wayne.

We are in this for the long haul. Afghanistan may not work out. There may have to be several more "new" Afghanistan policies before we find one that works. There may be no way to keep the war going long enough to win it. So President Obama is walking a real tightrope, but it is a necessary tightrope. Walking necessary tightropes is what great presidents do.