This is one American who is losing faith in his fellow citizens

In the wake of 9/11, the United States went to war in Afghanistan in order to oust the Taliban-led government which enabled and sheltered Osama bin Laden and al Quaeda.

The Taliban was ousted and a deeply-flawed but marginally viable government was installed. But unlike our ancestors, Americans have short attention spans, and seem to lack the resolve and backbone to do what we have to do for the cause of freedom and make it stick.

As portrayed at the end of the wonderful Tom Hanks film Charlie Wilson's War, we had originally turned our backs on our Afghan allies once the Soviets were ousted from Afghanistan, allowing the Taliban to establish itself in the first place. We started to lose interest once again once the Taliban had been turned out of power- with the result that the Taliban staged a comeback. The deterioration of the situation there was heralded by great publicity provided by the liberal media. As a result, support for the war plummeted. We even elected a president who pledged- foolishly-to establish a deadline for U.S. withdrawal regardless of the situation on the ground.

Such an arrangement, of course, makes success very unlikely. It amounts to a message to the enemy to the effect that if they simply hang back and conserve their resources, they will have a free hand once we've had a chance to get out of the country and leave it to them.

Even Barack Obama, though, is having second thoughts. Once a person actually is responsible for the nation's foreign policy instead of being a mere critic, he is compelled to confront consequences. And the consequences of abandoning Afghanistan would be that once again al Quaeda would have an entire country to serve as its base of operations, and, together with their Taliban allies, would be free to spread the cancer of Islamic extremism and terrorism throughout the world.

Ironically,  one of the greatest heroes of modern American history, Gen. David Petraeus, has turned the situation around in Afghanistan just as he did in Iran. For the second time in as many "unwinnable" wars, a "surge" has reversed the direction of the war and placed us on the verge of victory.

Gen. Petraeus pointed out before a congressional committee this past week that while we are now winning, the situation is not irreversible. Indications have persisted that we may not fully withdraw from Afghanistan in July after all; the consequences of premature abandonment of the Karzai government might yet snatch defeat from the jaws of something which looks very much like victory.

We seem to be on the point of winning in Afghanistan, just as we seem to have won in Iraq. Two wars that the Democrats and the Left have told us for years were unwinnable seem about to be won. How about that? And now, at the point of denying al Queda and its ilk the use of Afghanistan as a source of personel, a training base, and a hiding place impervious to search on what will hopefully be a permanent basis, most of us want to surrender.

Perhaps it's all that care the media has taken to present the war in  the most pessimistic possible terms. Or maybe we, as a nation, have simply lost our resolve, or character, our backbones, and/or our minds.

But a record number of Americans apparently no longer think the war in Afghanistan was worth it, and want to give up.  One may debate the wisdom of the war in Iraq, the other victorious war the incumbent President and the Left did every thing possible to lose (though here again, Mr. Obama should be given credit for coming to his senses and recognizing both the success of the "surge" he so vigorously denounced before the fact and the geopolitical consequences of employing the policy of surrender in Iraq he advocated throughout his campaign). But not to put too fine a point on it, to give up in Afghanistan would be, in effect, to let the people sheltered Osama and abetted those who flew those planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon get away with it. No reasonable person can advance an argument that, as most of us now seem to believe, the war in Afghanistan is not "worth it" without confessing an attitude which would have made pretty much any American hide his face in shame in the aftermath of the attacks whose perpetrators were sheltered and trained in a country governed by the very people we are fighting there.

The same nation which displayed the flag from every available pole or lamp post in the wake of 9/11 is now ready to run up the white one. Perhaps, while we're at it, we might apologize to Osama. And perhaps, given the apparent change in our national character and values over the past decade, the Stars and Stripes should be replaced as our national flag by a white one, perhaps depicting a bunny rabbit and the caption, "Tread on me."

HT: Drudge