Polls show that more Americans don't think Afghanistan is worth the costs. But on Capitol Hill, there's little taste for a fight on the issue.

Doyle McManus
LA Times
March 17, 2011

The war in Afghanistan, our longest war, is well into its 10th year. It claimed the lives of 499 U.S. troops in 2010, and more lives will be lost once the "fighting season" resumes in the spring. The financial cost of the conflict is heading toward $300 million a day.

Yet when the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, testified before Senate and House committees this week, most of the seats in the public and news media sections were empty. Senators and House members drifted in and out, just as they do in hearings about farm price supports or bank reform. Two demonstrators from Code Pink stood as Petraeus testified, quietly uttered a sentence or two of protest — "The American people don't support this war" — and left peaceably. It wasn't so much a disruption as a ritual invocation.

The demonstrators were correct on the facts: The American people don't support the war. A Washington Post-ABC News poll released this week found that the share of the public that says the war in Afghanistan isn't worth the costs has risen to a record 64%, and 73% of those polled said they'd like to see a "substantial number" of troops withdrawn this year. But the war isn't the top issue for most Americans; the economy is. And since on Capitol Hill, at least, most Republicans support the war and most Democrats don't want to criticize their own president, a temporary truce has settled over the issue.

As a result, Petraeus, who endured stormy hearings in 2007 and 2008 when he was U.S. commander in Iraq, faced few challenging questions in his eight hours before the committees this week. Still, his answers — which he said were intended to be neither optimistic nor pessimistic, merely "realistic" — merit attention.

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