One Good War Deserves Another

Yochi Dreazen and Peter Spiegel have posted a foreboding article in the Washington Post today: according to US General Stanley McChrystal, the Taliban have gained the upper hand in Afghanistan. What does this mean to the United States? A troop increase, of course - at least that's the suggestion. It looks like as the involvement in Iraq ramps down, involvement in Afghanistan with ramp up.
Our troops stand to face almost the same problem with this foretold troop surge: an elusive guerrilla enemy. Around 45 soldiers died last month in Afghanistan, and already this month we have lost 12. Often the cause of these deaths can be attributed to roadside bombs, random village encounters, and militants with rockets. How are we to ever control an enemy that attacks mostly in small numbers and sets up shadow governments that we have little to no information on?
My estimate: it is doubtful we can. We have set out to fight a war on terror, a war that sets out in vain to eliminate a concept. Not only are $4 billion dollars of taxpayer money going to the war in Afghanistan every month, but they are funneling into the most pompous of motivations. This, not the fact that we are "losing," is what I find to be foreboding.
The United States thinks quite highly of itself, deigning to clean up the government in Iraq by instituting for them a democracy. Continuing Cold War ideals of making sure our hand is guiding any unstable pocket of the world remains an important tenet of the collective government mind, and this hubris is the reason for much militant opposition to America today.
I don't remark that pulling our troops out will do Afghanistan any good, maybe the opposite, but we never belonged there in such great numbers in the first place. To find terrorists, you need special teams, not extensive armies. We were there to find first and foremost Osama Bin Laden, and we have failed to do this. If' he is the tactical mastermind that the government makes him out to be, he probably isn't hanging around the country where we'll have 68,000 troops by year's end.
I know the argument is that if we pull out our troops we'll seem to have been defeated rather than as acknowledging that the effort was ill-founded to begin with. The Taliban will gloat that America could not defeat them. They will have their words, but that is all. They will not have actually weakened us but in frustration at ourselves. If the influence of the Taliban increases, we have secret services that can take the missions as we have in the past, but we need not ramp up the Afghanistan war and sacrifice American lives perpetually for a symbolic war.