Biden Is The New Rumsfeld?

Peter Beinart thinks so, pointing to a shared aversion to nation building in Afghanistan:

History plays nasty jokes. In 2002, to be a foreign policy liberal was to believe in nation building: to believe that when the United States bombed another country, America had a responsibility to help rebuild it afterwards. Today, however, it is mostly conservativesbuoyed by the apparent success of the surge in Iraq--who demand that America commit to nation building in Afghanistan. And it is mostly liberals like Biden who hold “out little hope that Afghanistan could ever be made into something much better.” In our ADD-political culture, barely anyone seems to notice that the two parties have switched sides.

Biden has every right to change his mind, and it’s understandable that he’s more pessimistic about Afghanistan today than he was in 2002. But I think he’s forgotten what he once knew. He and other anti-surge liberals speak as if America is losing in Afghanistan because Afghanistan is irredeemable, when the real reason America is losing is becauseas Biden himself once screamedAmerica hasn’t really tried.