After Iraq, Afghanistan...

The United States has declared that the Iraq war is “over” — or at least so far as U.S. troops in combat are concerned.

The idea is that we are winding down having U.S. troops in Iraq, to a little fewer than 50,000 — and that they are intended just to be helpers of the Iraqi troops, who now are supposed to bear the main burden of dealing with varied dissident elements.

We surely would be glad to be out of Iraq — if the result did not turn out to be a win for the enemies we have been fighting. We certainly don’t want them to take over in our wake.

We’ll have to wait awhile to find out whether we can eventually claim “success” in Iraq.

But what about Afghanistan?

We are still very much involved militarily there with no prospect of an end in sight. There are varied guerrilla attacks, murderous roadside bombs and entrenched elements killing both Afghans and U.S. troops.

A “win” in Iraq would mean just no more big fighting. What would a “win” in Afghanistan look like? Neither our political nor our military leaders are suggesting a satisfactory solution is at hand in Afghanistan.

How did we get involved there? The Soviet Union tried to take over Afghanistan — for many years — before the Russians finally gave up, after extensive losses, and pulled out. We got involved to keep the Russians from taking over, and we later invaded after the Taliban in Afghanistan harbored 9/11 terrorist Osama bin Laden. Now we are like the old story of “Br’er Rabbit and the Tar Baby.” We are “stuck” in a bad situation and can’t quite get loose.

So what is our strategy? What is our goal? When will our objective be achieved? What would it look like?

Most Americans don’t seem to know.

Our political leaders haven’t defined “victory” in Afghanistan. Our military forces are stuck there, like the Tar Baby.

Few people suggest what’s happening in Iraq is really a “satisfactory solution.” But nobody in high places seems to know what to do, how to do it, or whether we are willing to pay the price to do whatever it is we want to do in Afghanistan.

What would we call “victory”? Or is our goal just to “keep something worse from happening”?

Americans would like to hear some kind of answer.

In World War II, we knew what we had to accomplish. In the Korean War, we knew what we had to avoid. In the Vietnam War, we were there a long time with terrible losses and finally just backed out — and the Communist Vietnamese took over.

We understand why nobody seems to want to “define” our Iraqi policy — and we especially understand why nobody seems to want to try to “define” our Afghanistan objective.

But since we are “stuck,” wouldn’t it be reasonable, and timely, for our president, our military leaders, our members of Congress — “somebody” — to give the American people a clear and simple view of our plans for solution, if not victory? We are losing American lives and spending a lot of taxpayer money.

We nearly always in the past have known “what we were fighting for.” It certainly would be helpful now for those in authority to define what we seek, how we can obtain it — and what worse situation we are trying to avoid.

Or should we expect just “more of the same” — an indecisive war with losses of Americans at great cost — and then what?