A prominent conservative thinker is calling on Republicans to begin a serious debate about the war in Afghanistan, its costs and what Ronald Reagan would do in the same circumstances.

And while Grover Norquist stopped short of personally calling for a rapid withdrawal, he made it clear Tuesday night that he thinks an honest conversation on the right would inevitably lead to that conclusion.

“I’m confident about where that conversation would go,” he told attendees of a dinner sponsored by the New America Foundation. “And I think the people who are against that conversation know where it would go, too.”

Norquist said he was aiming his plea to “the people who voted for Ronald Reagan, or would have.” And he pointed out that Reagan’s response to the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon, which cost 241 American lives, was not to occupy Lebanon.

“His reaction to the Lebanon bombing was not to stay, it was to leave,” Norquist said. “Ronald Reagan didn’t decide to fix Lebanon. I think that’s helpful in getting the conversation going on the right.” ~The Huffington Post

Via Andrew

It’s not so clear to me where such a conversation would go. If there is a prevailing view among conservatives today, it is not one that favors either full withdrawal or the current level of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Instead, the dominant view seems to be one that endorses continuing the war for the foreseeable future with fewer resources, which is George Will’s worst-of-both-worlds position that I have been arguing against for the last year. Given the choice between that and continuing the current war effort, most policymakers are going to choose the latter, because it becomes a choice between waging incompetent, perpetual war and waging a war that is at least limited in its objectives and its timeline. Since that has been the real choice before us for the last two years, I remain convinced that the latter makes more sense than reverting to Bush-style “counter-terrorism” and mismanagement.

As Greg Scoblete noted today in his post referring to an Afghanistan Study Group poll, there aren’t that many conservatives or Tea Partiers that endorse the war in Afghanistan as it is currently being fought (24%/28%). Large majorities of both conservatives overall and Tea Partiers believe the war costs too much (71%/67%), and they want reductions in the numbers of troops (66%/64%), but a substantial plurality also believes that the U.S. can continue to fight the war effectively with fewer troops (39%). In other words, a plurality wants to resume the Bush-era war effort that keeps us in Afghanistan with insufficient resources and heavy reliance on air power, and another 24% supports the war at its current levels, and just 27% favor full withdrawal. The position endorsed by the 39% is perpetual war on the cheap, and there is even less chance of fully extricating the U.S. from such a conflict when its direct costs are minimal or hidden. An honest conversation on the right would reveal that approximately two-thirds of people on the right don’t really want to end the war, but around half of those don’t want to pay for it, either.

Let’s consider Norquist’s Lebanon argument. If we are having an honest conversation, the first observation I would make is that very few people are going to see the relevance of what the Reagan administration did after blundering into the middle of an Israeli invasion of its neighbor when it comes to thinking about Afghanistan one way or the other. U.S. involvement in Lebanon should never have happened in the first place, as the U.S. had no security interests at stake. Reagan’s recognition and correction of his earlier error were good, but the lesson to learn from Lebanon was that we should never have been involved. Very few people on the right agree that the U.S. should never have become involved in Afghanistan, and it seems to me that almost everyone on the right, including almost all opponents of the war in Iraq, believed that the war in Afghanistan was at least initially justified and appropriate, and almost all of them continued to believe this up until very recently. The Lebanon example doesn’t help get the conversation going, because it isn’t a particularly relevant example for the subject we’re discussing. If Norquist is trying to appeal to people who would have voted for Reagan, as he says, he isn’t off to a very good start.

Update: James Joyner was at the same New America Foundation gathering, and he explains that Norquist made use of this poll when he made the remarks about the war. Here’s Joyner on Norquist and the poll:

Now, as I told Clemons and Norquist during the Q&A session, I think the poll is a publicity stunt of dubious probative value. (I may have used more colorful language.) The truth of the matter is that most Americans have only the vaguest notions of how much our government spends and therefore have no context whatsoever against which to judge numbers. “$119 billion” is a scary number to bandy about but it’s a tiny fraction of a $3.69 trillion budget. One could imagine that, if people were told that the Department of Labor spends $117.5 billion a year, they’d wonder whether we couldn’t get by without that, too. Much less $915.5 billion for Health and Human Services. I’m guessing NAF won’t be polling on that, though.

Whether we’re getting good value for our investment in Afghanistan isn’t a matter of uninformed reaction to big numbers but rather an assessment of costs and benefits. Indeed, Norquist readily acknowledges this, saying we need to have “a conversation” “about the vast expenditures of cash, the vast expenditures of other people lives, and the opportunity cost.” He insists that, while everyone, himself included, agreed that we needed to go to war to “hit back at those who hit us on 9/11,” we’ve not really had an honest dialog about the years-long rebuilding effort that followed toppling the Taliban.

While we’ve certainly talked about it — rather a lot in fact — over the years, it’s mostly been at the level of platitude. We’ve got to “finish the job” and “achieve victory,” however that’s defined. And, Norquist’s least favorite, “we have to support the troops.” The heated political environment, in which openly talking about ending the mission short of achieving our lofty goals would bring catcalls of “surrender” and “appeasement” and “betrayal,” makes an adult conversation difficult.

So, Norquist is trying to use the cost issue as a means of getting around this dilemma. But, while fiscal issues are his bread and butter, it’s not what’s driving his opposition to the war.

Rather, he argues, “Being tied up there does not advance American power.” He explained, “If you’ve got a fist in the tar baby Iraq and you’ve got a fist in the tar baby Afghanistan, then who’s afraid of you?” While HuffPo’s Dan Froomkin cringes at the loaded metaphor, it’s Norquist’s belief that our long adventures in the region weaken our leverage against the likes of Iran and North Korea [bold mine-DL].

As with so many other conservatives claiming to be “antiwar” because of their objections to Afghanistan, Norquist wants to free up military resources so that they might be turned toward the “real” threats that he identifies elsewhere. Afghanistan is arguably the one place where U.S. military power should be deployed overseas right now, and Norquist is concerned that it is distracting us from confronting states that we already effectively deter.