By Anthony Gregory

In late 2001, by most estimations, Osama bin Laden and his cohorts escaped from Tora Bora after the U.S. government decided to depend on the bloodthirsty and unreliable Northern Alliance to apprehend al Qaeda members. Seven years later, American troops are still in Afghanistan. Last month was America’s bloodiest month there, this year is already NATO’s deadliest year, the violence continues to explode and President Obama is sending ever more troops.

Why are we still there? Soon after the invasion, it became a nation-building exercise to promote democracy. The Bush administration repeatedly boasted that it had liberated and brought elections to the nation, as well as to Iraq. Of course, this was the same president who, as a candidate for the 2000 election, had decried “nation-building” when debating with Al Gore. (It was for such reasons that I and many other patriotic lovers of liberty and the Constitution rooted for him over Gore.) Furthermore, the very idea that the U.S. should wage war to make the world safe for democracy is not a traditionally conservative or American doctrine at all, but rather one that most starkly goes back to Woodrow Wilson’s “war to end all wars.”

The neoconservatives and liberal interventionists agree that promoting democracy worldwide is worth American blood, prestige, treasure and even vulnerability to terrorist attacks. But classical conservatives of the Old Right tradition, as well as classical liberals of the 19th century Democratic mold, have eschewed such utopian experiments in warfare and international social engineering. The Democratic candidates in 2004 and 2008 both accused Bush of “neglecting” Afghanistan, in fact. Sadly, with Obama’s rise to power, we have even more emphasis on nation-buidling, which is completely compatible with the modern Democratic agenda that brought us all the major wars from World War I to Vietnam.

But how is this experiment in democracy working out for us? As Michael Scheuer, former CIA bin Laden expert and author of Imperial Hubris has argued, if Afghanistan were to truly be ruled by a majority-approved regime, it would not be one American politicians would be very happy with. The culture of Afghanistan will not yield a liberal democracy with minority rights but a theocracy that Americans would not be so eager to fight to protect.

Moreover, the recent Afghanistan election is not exactly what we would consider beyond reproach. Most Americans were criticial of the Iranian election in June, but the Afghanistan election is also replete with irregularities, to say the least.

Now a major given reason for staying is to keep our ally Pakistan in line and stable, even as the Obama administration launches drone attacks and has contributed to a humanitarian disaster of millions of displaced people. And all the war party can suggest is ever more troops, ever more intervention, ever more war.

Rightwing radio host Michael Savage now asks, “Why are we in Afghanistan?” As the Democrats are now in power, and liberal opposition to the war has been muted by partisan concerns and a true belief in the power of the U.S. government to advance American values abroad through force, perhaps our biggest hope is growing disenchantment with nation-building on the right—the same kind of disenchantment that led Republicans to win elections to end the Korean and Vietnam wars, the same suspicion of the capacity for the U.S. empire to transform societies abroad that inspired conservatives to reject the Kosovo war under Bill Clinton and to support the candidate in 2000 who promised a “more humble foreign policy.” And given the unparalleled threat to American security, liberty and financial stability that U.S. foreign policy represents, perhaps it is true, as leftist John Walsh has said, that we need “an antiwar movement only the right can lead.”