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I disagree about that inevitability, as well as on whether our responsibilities cease simply because we decide that they're really hard to fulfill.
Let me caveat what is to follow with a clear statement that I'm not saying anybody here has done this, we haven't talked about Afghanistan enough in the past for me to have a sense of it. but I have also noticed a certain predictable behavior from a segment of the anti-war movements.
When Iraq was going poorly (well, much more poorly than it is going now anyway) they used their support of the war in Afghanistan to burnish their credentials of not being anti-all-wars. In fact they frequently said that Iraq was distracting us from the appropriate war in Afghanistan and that is the one we should be fighting.
Now that we have a reasonably solid exit plan for Iraq and the move is to focus on Afghanistan, the goalposts have moved and they are against that war as well.
I think this is a cause of some suprise for Obama since he said all along that Afghanistan is the war we should have been fighting, Iraq was a distraction from that, and he'd put an end to Iraq and focus on Afghanistan.
It appears that was a serious set of policy beliefs on his part and the sand is shifting beneath him since it was apparently just a cynical expedient position for several segments (again by no means all, there were plenty of anti-war people were very clear about being against any and all wars) of his base.
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