Garry Wills Breaks Silence on Post-Election Dinner with Obama

(July 29) -- Garry Wills, one of the nation's most respected historians, broke silence about a dinner he and eight other historians had with President Barack Obama more than a year ago, on June 30, 2009. The main discussion point was the futility of the United States' continued involvement in Afghanistan, which Obama has made the country's "longest war and what may turn out to be its most disastrous one," Wills writes in The New York Review of Books.

Wills describes his contribution to the dinner:

"When Obama said that he was surprised that the left was so critical of him, I said that it would continue to be critical so long as he issued signing statements before passage of a law. He asked which one I objected to, and I said that any are unconstitutional. At the end of the meal, he went around the table one time more to ask if there was a final bit of advice we would give. When my turn came, I joined those who had already warned him about an Afghanistan quagmire. I said that a government so corrupt and tribal and drug-based as Afghanistan's could not be made stable. He replied that he was not naive about the difficulties but he thought a realistic solution could be reached. I wanted to add 'when pigs fly,' but restrained myself."

Meanwhile, in Thursday's New York Times, columnist Nicholas Kristof also criticizes Obama's Afghanistan policy, citing its cost -- it's "the costliest war in American history aside from World War II," adjusting for inflation.

It's now Obama's war, not Bush's, he writes. Obama is asking for more military spending than under Bush, and he's tripled the number of American troops in Afghanistan.

Couldn't taxpayer money be spent better, even in Afghanistan, Kristof wonders?

"For the cost of just one soldier in Afghanistan for one year, we could start about 20 schools there. Hawks retort that it's impossible to run schools in Afghanistan unless there are American troops to protect them. But that's incorrect.

CARE, a humanitarian organization, operates 300 schools in Afghanistan, and not one has been burned by the Taliban. Greg Mortenson, of 'Three Cups of Tea' fame, has overseen the building of 145 schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan and operates dozens more in tents or rented buildings -- and he says that not one has been destroyed by the Taliban either.

We won our nation's independence for $2.4 billion in today's money, the Congressional Research Service report said. That was good value, considering that we now fritter the same amount every nine days in Afghanistan. Mr. Obama, isn't it time to rebalance our priorities?"