President Obama's rationale for continuing the war in Afghanistan is based on tired fictions and manipulative rhetoric. This is tragic for Afghanistan and the U.S., as well as for the President's overall agenda. These fictions assert a powerful hold over us and reflect serious misconceptions about the character of the world today.

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Presidential Fictions that Bind Us to Afghanistan

President Obama's approach to the war in Afghanistan embraces two fictions: that we are 1) engaged in "nation-building" and 2) fighting international terrorism. Fictions they may be, but they are potent ones for as long as they prevail, our policies will only lead to greater destruction and eventual disaster for the U.S. itself.

Certainly the PresidentÅ? statement on July 14^th about an exit strategy for Afghanistan sound reasonable. We need to train the Afghan military and police and shore up the courts and government, work with its neighbors (Pakistan and Iran?), and other foreign powers to guarantee Afghanistan's security and viability. There is, on the face of it, little to argue with in this rational programmatic assessment. But if Afghanistan "" or U.S. foreign policy "" were rational to begin with, we wouldn't be there in the first place.

The question that bedevils me is whether President Obama truly believes that we can "succeed" in Afghanistan even though we have no idea what success will, should, or could look like, at least not in terms reasonably applicable to Afghanistan. Perhaps the President feels a prisoner himself. Cutting defense spending would only throw more people out of work. Reversing the course of the previous eight years in every area of endeavor will frighten the ever-timid Democrats in Congress and lose him vital political support for the rest of his agenda. Perhaps getting out of Iraq (or appearing to) is the most important challenge and there's no way we can "abandon" both nations at once.

This approach to politics, however, doesn't really work. It's the sort of thinking that led John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, and a host of other Democrats to support the Iraqi War at its inception. And it can sink President Obama's administration too. Reasonable and balanced solutions work on paper but are often bitterly divorced from reality. Let's look at both the alleged fictions that the President has embraced.

Nation-building: The problem with nation-building in Afghanistan is that Afghanistan is only "sort-of" a nation, in the same way an atom is constructed "sort of" like the solar system. In our solar system, the planets "" clearly defined objects "" orbit the sun at speeds and locations precisely defined and predicted by Newtonian physics. In an atom, electrons orbit the nucleus. The catch is, electrons aren't like planets. We cannot calculate both their exact positions and speeds at the same time. They are unpredictable, with no clear boundaries, and are often described as charged clouds of probabilities. No one can ever state with certainty the precise relationship of the electrons to the nucleus that binds them, a condition explained by physicist Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.

Our idea of a "nation" is very different from what exists in Afghanistan. Our idea of nations is from Newton, Afghanistan is from Heisenberg. Afghanistan is a nucleus "" Kabul and the idea of an Afghan nation "" surrounded by cloudy, murky uncertainties in the form of tribes, clans, regional alliances, long folk memories, etc. This isn't a knock on Afghanistan. Nation-states do not define the ultimate form of social organization. We do forget that, though. Nations developed out of a particular set of circumstances native to Europe from the late Middle Ages to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Being a nation is not the pre-ordained state of every territory defined by lines on a map. Still, it may be possible for Afghanistan to become a well-defined nation "" but it won't happen through the process of destabilization and corruption that currently governs its fate.

It is proverbial that Afghanistan is a graveyard of imperial aspirations. Empires enter Afghanistan and find that, like some legendary tai chi master, there is nothing there to dominate. More subtle players of the Great Game, as the jockeying for position in the Asian heartland was called in the 19^th century, might reply that while Afghanistan has little of value in and of itself, it is like one of the four central squares on the chess board. It occupies a crucial strategic space in Asia, a gateway to Pakistan and India, a conduit to China's unstable west, a beckoning prize for Iran, and, in Soviet and czarist days, a rock in the way of Russian aspirations to the south.

What are we trying to do there? There is nothing to do. Afghanistan now is what it has always been and all of America's protestations of good intentions and President Obama's cool rhetoric won't hide the fact that we originally went in like a SWAT team on steroids on a mission of punishment and revenge. Somehow, that has turned into a vague mission of salvation, salvation for them and for us.

Fighting Terrorism: Take this AP report from March 27^th:

President Barack Obama on Friday ordered 4,000 more military troops into Afghanistan, vowing to "disrupt, dismantle and defeat" the terrorist al-Qaida network in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan.

In a war that still has no end in sight, Obama said the fresh infusion of U.S. forces is designed to bolster the Afghan army and turn up the heat on terrorists that he said are plotting new attacks against Americans. The plan takes aim at terrorist havens in Pakistan and challenges the government there and in Afghanistan to show more results.

Obama called the situation in the region "increasingly perilous" more than seven years after the Taliban was removed from power in Afghanistan.

The delusion is so salient that it is painful to read, even down to the determined alliteration of the three "Ds" - "disrupt, dismantle, and defeat". We shall do or die indeed. It is disappointing to hear President Obama follow the tired public-manipulation tactic of raising a rag-tag army or third-rate dictator to bogy-man status. Summoning all his gravitas, he conjures the vision of a potent terrorist network that is more dangerous than ever and that is "plotting new attacks on Americans".

The 1984-ish absurdity of the perpetual war that is no closer to ending now than when it began, is delivered without irony, without question. Into a war that has no end in sight, Obama is sending 4,000 more troops. Four thousand! Will these 4,000 bring the end any closer, perhaps even within sight? Well, we're more than seven years into it and, according to the President, things are worse than ever. On July 11^th, after 15 British troops had died in July, the President said "we still have a long way to go" and indeed, July is the bloodiest month for the "coalition" since the war began. Of course, we have (unmanned) drones hard at work, shooting up "militants". Sometimes. Sometimes they hit a wedding or a funeral. Perhaps they can make a movie out it: "Four Weddings and A Funeral: A Drone's Day in Afghanistan". Sometimes, undoubtedly, most of the dead are young and middle-aged men. Definitely al Qaeda. Or Taliban. Whatever.

Of course, neither Taliban nor those who identify themselves as al Qaeda have any claim on our sympathies. But that is not the point. We're not doing much good either fomenting an endless war against enemies who may or may not be distinguishable from the general population. We are there killing civilians, destroying the countryside, and setting our own soldiers up to die or suffer grievous wounds for a policy that has no focus and no real purpose.

There is no "war against terror". Terror is a perpetual condition of the human psyche. To become enmeshed in a war on terror is, inevitably, to turn one's guns on the terror within oneself. There can only be war against a defined entity whose defeat can be measured by a specific set of conditions that one's victory engenders. Whatever the band of misfits responsible for 9/11, al Qaeda was nothing more than a name that some of them may have adhered to. It is the United States that has made that name a rallying point for violent, angry men in the Muslim world. It is we who, in a process of self-fulfilling prophecy, have turned al Qaeda into a recognizable force, although one whose exact scale and scope of operations are never described for the American people. Yet we are asked to support this perpetual war that has destabilized Pakistan (which according to the President, is one of the resources we shall use to stabilize Afghanistan), helped drive us into bankruptcy, killed numerous innocents, ripped apart families in our own nation through death and separation and injury, and done absolutely nothing to prevent terrorism on the blind claim that we are there as part of the glorious, unending war against terror.

But won't a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan be a breeding ground for terrorists who target Americans, as the President claims? No. In fact, one can argue that it does not matter where a terrorist plot originates anymore than it matters where heroin or cocaine originates. What matters is how one intercedes at the various staging points that lead to the final delivery of a bomb or drug. We cannot patrol every city and town, every cave, every fundamentalist enclave and then go to war when we discover some activity there anymore than we can control or eviscerate every field where coca or poppies grow. The best defenses against terrorism are efficiently applied technological filters, solid investigative work at home, and intelligence work abroad. For starters, let's get the FBI out of the business of spying on peace activists. What a blow that's been for homeland security!

The terrorist threat against the United States does not stem from a devious cabal hiding out in the caves of Afghanistan and safe houses of Pakistan. In fact, the T Taliban, loathesome though they are, are not in and of themselves a terrorist network targeting the United States. We attacked them for harboring bin Laden. Personally, I'd like to see the whole movement dismantled and disintegrated. But we didn't go into Afghanistan to build a nation or liberate the population. We went in there to punish the Taliban for their sheltering of Osama bin Laden and now we're not sure exactly what we're doing there or even who has realliy been protecting bin Laden for the past eight years, or even whether he's alive. But we do know that a Quaker peace group in a small town in Pennsylvania had a meeting three months ago.

Just as the drug war's military solutions have achieved less than nothing against groups embedded in their own native populations (and whose largest market happens to be the very U.S. taxpayers funding the war against drugs), so too is the war against terrorism misdirected at wiping out terrorism at the source. The fact is, this cannot be done. It is a chimera, a pink elephant, an opium dream, poppycock. As long as this world has a potent mix of unlimited arms dealing, disenfranchised and embittered populations, too-easy recourse to military solutions, and irrational religious and national agendas, we will have terrorism. Just as cocaine and heroin will always be with us, so too will potential terrorists unless the fundamental conditions that give rise to the demand for drugs and terrorist action are changed.

Terrorism cannot be defeated by invading a nation that happens to have terrorist supporters living within its borders. President Obama is a very intelligent man who can articulate solutions in a pleasing and reasonable manner. But the mistake of the past eight years cannot be solved by a policy that has only gotten bloodier while going nowhere. The absurdity of our publicly articulated assumptions about nation-building and terrorism is not the only weakness in the President's justification of our Afghan policy. The fact is, there is no "scenario of success" that the President "" or Congress, the Pentagon, or CIA "" can define with any clarity. And by promulgating the same old confused rhetoric and irrational fixations disguised as considered policy, the President is, in the long run, undermining his own broader agenda. Perhaps the required solution is beyond the ability of any one man, one nation, or single plan. Whether or not a "solution" even exists, we will engender only further destruction and more violent enmities by following the Orwellian notion that the way to peace and security is through perpetual war.

Authors Bio:
Barton Kunstler, Ph.D. is a writer of fiction, essays, poetry, and plays. He is author of "The Hothouse Effect" (Amacom), a book describing the dynamics of highly creative groups and organizations. His play, "An Inquiry in Florence", was recently performed at Westchester's Schoolhouse Theater in Croton Falls, NY. Barton contributes to OEN and the HuffPost on political and social issues, and has been involved in progressive causes and campaigns since early in his teens.