Bret Devereaux

U.S. way of life/values. When other rationales for the GWOT started to collapse, like IQ WMD, they could always lean back on "we need to fight to demonstrate resolve because lack of resolve got us hit in the first place." To simply fight, within this logic, is to win...

or at least not lose. @ahsanib's work explores this "demonstration effect" issue re the Iraq War extremely well. My piece is trying to bring in the cultural/intellectual/political side of things to explore how this mentality became embedded on the right and persists today.

Stephens' piece is a textbook case of looking at only one factor behind terrorism, the one that aligns with the conservative critique of U.S. society, and making that THE cause and THE reason to keep fighting in AF...

I'm certainly willing to consider arguments for keeping a presence in AF, but demonstrating resolve is not one of them.

One thing at work here, I suspect, is the shaping effect that public opinion places. Historically speaking, most empires, hegemons, great powers, etc. have been very comfortable waging expressly punitive expeditions in response to being attacked.

But the American self-conception makes it hard to justify a punitive operation as a resolve-showing-measure. We *do* lots of punitive operations, but we have to call them something else, or pretend they're actually intended to alter behavior or deter or what have you.

One wonders if perhaps we'd have been more honest w/ ourselves if we admitted at the outset that we were just going to take revenge on the Taliban by doing lots of violence to them for a period of 10-20 years instead of imagining we were going to liberalize&modernize Afghanistan.

Idk, but I highly recommend Wes Morgan's new book on the Pech Valley to explore the questions of who exactly we were fighting there and what the reasoning was.