New Roundtable: Defeat in Afghanistan? The View from 2050

Marines protecting Afghan father and son

Forward thinking blog friend Lexington Green, contributor to the Chicago Boyz Blog has announced an important upcoming blog roundtable this summer that will discuss a topic that for several months has been lurking in the minds of many people. Here is Lex's proposal for Defeat in Afghanistan? The View from 2050.

Voices from many quarters are saying dire things about the American-led campaign in Afghanistan. The prospect of defeat, whatever that may mean in practice, is real. But we are so close to the events, it is hard to know what is and is not critical. And the facts which trickle out allow people who are not insiders to only have a sketchy, pointillist impression of the state of play. There is a lot of noise around a weak signal.

ChicagoBoyz will be convening a group of contributors to look back on the American campaign in Afghanistan from a forty year distance, from 2050.

40 years is the period from Fort Sumter to the Death of Victoria, from the Death of Victoria to Pearl Harbor, from Pearl Harbor to the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. It is a big chunk of history. It is enough time to gain perspective.

This exercise in informed and educated imagination is meant to help us gain intellectual distance from the drumbeat of day to day events, to understand the current situation in Afghanistan more clearly, to think-through the potential outcomes, and to consider the stakes which are in play in the longer run of history for America, for its military, for the region, and for the rest of the world.

The Roundtable contributors will publish their posts and responses during the third and fourth weeks of August, 2010.

The ChicagoBoyz blog is a place where we can think about the unthinkable.

Stand by for further details, including a list of our contributors.

Cross posted at zenpundit


Many of those already signed on; represent a broad range of thinkers who will be bringing a convergence of ideas from all political, diplomatic and military points of view. One might question what a group of bloggers without political or military power can do that would influence policy or drive the discussion. That friends, is the power of this medium, to drive public discourse, something the mainstream media and the halls of Congress and the White House seems ill prepared to conduct.