I realize that I may be becoming something of a broken record on Afghanistan, continuing to insist that we should get out of there while the getting is good.  Nonetheless, as the smell of death wafts under the doors of that policy edifice, I feel compelled to try one more time to make the case.

Perhaps it comes from having just returned from Ho Chi Minh City, or Saigon, where a tour guide insisted on showing us the building from the roof of which the last official Americans were evacuated by helicopter from the South Vietnamese capital. I knew about it already and had seen photographs and film footage, but it still made me singularly uncomfortable to look at the site of America's final humiliation there at the end of decades of war.  The war cost thousands of American and other lives, and a fortune in money needed at home.

Why do we have to do the same thing again in Afghanistan?